


Crescendo

by fractalserpentine, HopeofDawn



Series: Sound and Fury [7]
Category: Transformers, Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied Torture, Insanity, Other, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2013-04-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 15:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 50,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/574850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fractalserpentine/pseuds/fractalserpentine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopeofDawn/pseuds/HopeofDawn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sparkright abides, immutable: subject to neither claim nor disclaimer,” Soundwave said, plucking a quote from his memory banks as he pushed himself to his pedes. The glyphs were old, the cadence strange in his vocalizer, but what other response could he make? The function instilled in a spark did not wither, did not fade at the command of other mecha.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Authors’ Notes: Crescendo is set in the same universe as Giants of the Earth, but in the distant past, during the start of the Autobot/Decepticon civil war. It is the fifth story in the Soundwave-centric (all tentacles, all the time!) ‘Sound and Fury’ series, which begins with ‘Propagation’. Soundwave, once a highly-ranked academic, is part of a frameclass that over time has been deemed obsolete, and as a result both he and his cohort are now struggling to survive. 
> 
> The final split between Optimus and Megatron has now been made, and Cybertron spins irrevocably on towards war. Soundwave knows that his cohort will no longer be safe at the Kaon Arena, but when every path leads to extinction, where can he turn?

Their quarters weren’t much, but they’d belonged to Soundwave and his cohort for a long time. He knew each dent of the walls, each scuff and scrape: over there was the gouge where Rumble and Frenzy had tussled over an inconsequential new toy. Up there, the paint flecks from the time Buzzsaw had painted himself gold and played the part of a lileth bird in a performance of the Trials of Aegis. Originally intended as berth-space for two full-sized mechs, the rooms were only barely large enough to accommodate all seven symbionts, small as they were, plus Soundwave’s own far-larger frame. Truthfully, their quarters were not much larger than their former home in Iacon, but they had made them their own in a way that the dingy and acid-scarred confines of their allotted residence had never been. They knew these quarters. They’d all become used to their place in the arena, this strange function he’d carved for them. They’d even thrived here.

What Soundwave did next … would change all of that forever.

It had been three orn since he’d learned the path that he must take. Three orn to grapple with the consequences of that path, the danger that it would pose to his cohort. With the things that he would need to do, regardless of how they violated his core coding, his most deeply held beliefs. Even now, he was not entirely sure that it was worth it. Whether this impossible goal was worth courting his own madness, his own death. Or worse, endangering the precious, star-bright sparks that had been entrusted to his care.

Always before, there had been an escape, a choice to remain true to his function above all else. Now … now he proposed expanding that function beyond any mech’s imagining. To take the entirety of his frameclass as his cohort, to place them under his protection, his authority--the very idea was madness. It was something he had never been built for.

And yet … in a world gone mad, what else could a Cybertronian do but adapt and survive?

Soundwave could feel the distant, heavy thrum of arena machinery through the metal decking beneath his pedes, could pick up on the distant comm-chatter; hails and inquiries, the minutiae of mecha going about their assigned duties. Military frametypes, almost all of them. There were few civilians left now. Soon, Soundwave thought, even those would be soldiers, regardless of their function or their framing.

Their quarters were spare, cramped as Soundwave’s cohort trickled in from all corners of the arena and Kaon. Buzzsaw and Laserbeak, so agile in the air, carving hairpin turns through the open hatch for the sheer joy of speed. Ratbat, squeaking from his somnolent perch on Soundwave’s shoulder, flapping his smaller wingplates at the flightframes in sleepy agitation. Flipsides, Rumble, and Frenzy tumbled in at once, all three mechkin babbling happily, Flipsides still with coolant from the medbay on his plating and the other two liberally coated with metaldust from the training grounds. Ravage joined them last, a shadow among shadows despite his size, stalking on silent cybercat pedes. 

Beautiful, all of them, topcoats well-maintained, joints unhindered by rust or neglect. All of them his, to the very spark, his to guard, to keep safe. He could lose them all by choosing wrongly now. 

Soundwave forced his ventilations to steady. 

His symbionts arranged themselves, waiting with growing solemnity, perched upon the minimal furnishings or curled on the floor according to their individual tastes. They all understood that the world was changing. They had waited through his silence, disturbed by their carrier’s distress, but obedient to his requests for solitude. Still, when he had finally called, they had come eagerly, wishing to be of help, of use. 

Each of them was unique, irreplaceable … and so small. No armor, minimal weaponry, and all of them watching him. Trusting him. No, bare survival was no longer enough. It had been bad enough in Iacon, only somewhat better in Kaon and now …. Ratbat’s ability had proven that to exist only on the sufferance of warframes was to invite disaster. 

“What’s up, Boss?” Rumble finally asked, fidgeting under Soundwave’s silent regard. He had tucked himself onto the same stool as his brother, which Frenzy had allowed with only a couple of shoves and some minor grumbling; all further evidence of his symbionts’ unease. Flipsides, for his part, had settled in closer to his Master, one small hand resting possessively on Soundwave’s leg, worry and unease rippling through his field.

“Soundwave: has come to a decision.” Their distress was distracting, and he did his best to stay on point, to verbalize his decision rationally and clearly. “Current status at the Kaon Arena, untenable. War, now inevitable; future resources, likely to be minimal. Our cohort, must choose with whom to ally.” He paused, marshalling his arguments carefully, as if he were defending his thesis before his fellow Archivists. “Soundwave: has decided to join the Decepticons. Advancement to officer ranks, offers best chance for our survival.”

“How ya gonna do that, Boss? Those cannon-humpers don’t respect anyone that ain’t military-framed. As far as they’re concerned, we’ll just be pathetic civilian wannabes that signed on for the free energon,” Rumble said, scowling.

“Correct. Our function, meaningless to Decepticon cause.” It was a harsh truth, but one they all had to accept. Precious and irreplaceable the symbionts were, but not for any reason that the rank and file Decepticons would recognize. “New duties must be undertaken.”

“What kind of skills would you have us learn?” Laserbeak said quietly, his carefully chosen words echoing with the forgotten cadences of the third Golden Age.

“Espionage. Stealth, communications. Politics.” He looked at Ratbat. “Find weaknesses. Exploit openings.” The glideframe on his shoulder nodded. It was not so different from what they already did, if viewed in a certain light. Their practice at the arena would help differentiate them all from the other civilian mecha joining the Decepticon cause. Their familiarity with warframes would help, as well. They’d all lived in close quarters with unpredictable, sometimes violent gladiators, and as part of the Decepticon forces, they couldn’t be seen huddling with other disaffected civilians like frightened glitchmice. To do so would only encourage the warframes’ disdain, and that was not what Soundwave needed. Not what *they* needed. 

“Master …” Flipsides said hesitantly. After more than ten vorn as part of Soundwave’s cohort, he was no longer as uncertain as he once had been. He was still far more retiring than most of the cohort’s other, more rambunctious members, however, preferring amicable compromise over territorial squabbling. Soundwave sent him a wordless glyph of encouragement, inviting Flipsides to speak his mind. “Wouldn’t … wouldn’t going to the Prime be better? Warframes--they’re dangerous. Optimus Prime’s side will have more civilian frametypes, they’ll understand why we might not be able to fight as well. We’ll--we’d be safer there, wouldn’t we?”

Soundwave inclined his head. “Affirmative. Prime’s faction, more conducive to cohort survival.”

Buzzsaw tilted his head, shifting his wings uncertainly. “Then why are we joining the Decepticons, Boss? D’you think Optimus is part of the problem, like Lord Megatron says?” 

Soundwave shook his helm. “Such considerations, beyond our scope. Soundwave’s function, to ensure the safety of symbionts. Joining the Prime, offers safety for our cohort -- but fighting, still likely to be required. Other cohorts, other chroniclers, unlikely to survive in the Prime’s forces.” He lifted a taloned hand to stroke along Ratbat’s optical ridge. He paused, knowing what he was about to ask them to understand would be difficult to accept. “This war, likely to cause the extinction of our frameclass. Chroniclers: will fail in our function. Soundwave: has found only one path that might prevent this.”

Laserbeak dipped his head. “Making a place for other cohorts among the Decepticons … will be more difficult than it was here, at the arena,” he said, unconvinced, but listening. The ancient flightframe had worried before, when Soundwave called so many of his kind to Kaon. Chronicler-cohorts were not gregarious by nature, and never, in all Laserbeak’s long view of recorded history, had a carrier taken such risks as Soundwave had to keep so many of his kind safe. 

In the end, the gamble had worked. Soundwave had, impossibly, managed to find places and positions for tens of thousands, had probably saved hundreds of sparks from the Well. 

But if most cohorts would not survive among the Prime’s forces, then even fewer could be expected to find safety with the Decepticons. Neither carriers nor symbionts were meant for war. Even those symbionts who could fight -- bladeframes, hornframes, even flightframes to a lesser extent -- rarely did so. And they were far outnumbered by symbiont classes who were incapable of carrying any practicable weapons at all -- glideframes, scaleframes, jumpframes, and many others. 

“Agreed,” said Soundwave. He drew a slow ventilation. “Soundwave: intends to shape the course of the war itself.” 

A long silence. It was almost unimaginable. Reshape a war? Influence its ever-shifting eddies and ripples to craft safe harbor for a select few? The sheer scale of such an endeavor was difficult to grasp, let alone contemplate. 

Ravage lifted his powerfully-built head and spoke, for the first time. “A daring proposition,” he said. “But how?”

Soundwave reached to trace talon tips over Ravage’s bladed back, marvelling as always in the gloss of the topcoat, the strength of the symbiont. “A place among the Decepticon high command... difficult for civilian frametypes to obtain,” he said slowly, hating every word. “Soundwave: will require... upgrades.”

The bladeframe’s optics narrowed. 

Flipsides looked up, hesitant. “I... which ones, Master? I mean, Primus knows we’ve got a whole lot of different weapons and stuff. And medics to install them! But you’re already carrying a lot of extra plating, and I know Stent had to put in some force multipliers to lift it all. You’re... already probably running pretty close to your spark output limit.”

“Modification required: singular, and minor.”

Ravage bared his long, serrated teeth. “Unacceptable,” the bladeframe said flatly, his flexing talons carving ribbons of solid steel from the flooring.

Flipsides glanced nervously between Ravage and Soundwave, uncomprehending. “S-soundwave? I... Ravage, what does he want to do?” the mechkin whispered, wishing he didn’t have to vocalize the question at all. 

Soundwave looked at them all. His beautiful cohort …. “Soundwave: will install Parametric’s field-reading module.”

The announcement was met with a moment of stunned silence, swiftly followed by a storm of protest.

“What?!”

“Slag, no! No way! Boss--”

“The risks … this is madness, Soundwave!” 

“Enough,” Soundwave said, silencing the babble with a carrier’s authority. “Risks, extremely high; outcome uncertain,” he admitted. “These considerations, already taken into account. Soundwave’s ability to process data, to handle sensory input, far greater than Parametric’s. Risks of this upgrade, now known. Allowances, can be made.” He paused, taking in his cohort’s horror. Gentling his vocalizer, he added, “This path, necessary.”

“Your death is necessary?” Ravage snapped. 

“Advancement through Decepticon ranks, necessary for our survival.” Soundwave met Ravage’s bristling indignation calmly. “Rapid advancement, necessary for others’ survival. Telepathic modifications, unique. Result: enhanced value to Decepticon cause. Many applications for such an ability; potential for promotion, very great.”

“But if you die, we’ll be without a carrier, and then we’ll probably die too,” Ratbat pointed out, little wingclaws clinging tightly to his perch. “Boss … I don’t know what you saw, but I don’t like this. Taking all this risk for mecha who’re probably gonna die anyway …”

“Cohort’s survival, still of paramount importance,” Soundwave said, leaning forward. “Soundwave: will take steps, make arrangements for your safety in event of death. Influence with other chronicler-carriers, sufficient to ensure this.” Laserbeak and Buzzsaw keened a wordless ultrasonic denial. “These plans, necessary,” he reminded them. “Soundwave: will not leave you unprotected.”

Rumble and Frenzy were both shaking their helms, small blunt fingers digging into the edge of their seat. “No, Boss--no! Frag the others--as long as we’re okay, that’s all that matters,” Rumble blurted. “They got their own carriers--let ‘em survive on their own, just like we hafta!”

“Symbiont deaths: unacceptable,” Soundwave said implacably. It was a command from which they knew he could not be moved. Carriers, ultimately, were expendable. Symbionts were not. Soundwave had proven how much he believed that, over and over, against even the Overlord and the Senate.

Ravage was on his feet in one lithe motion, circling to sit in front of his Master. “This is truly the only way?” he asked, a narrowed crimson stare boring into Soundwave’s visor. “You are going to risk your life, your sanity, the safety of our cohort, all in the hopes of saving strangers? To protect symbionts you’ve never met? Symbionts who belong to other carriers?”

“Affirmative,” Soundwave replied without hesitation. He didn’t dare let his resolve waver, even in the face of his First’s disapproval, his cohort’s fear and confusion. He reached outward, to stroke over those bristled sensory spines; Ravage shifted minutely away, so that Soundwave’s talons touched only air, and his spark clenched. “Soundwave … is still yours. Will always be yours,” he said, almost pleading. “Survival of other symbionts, other carriers; necessary for Cybertron’s future. This future, only possible through great risk. All other military designs: incompatible with frametype, unlikely to achieve desired result.” A carrier-mech’s systems were simply too specialized for extensive warframe modifications.

Ravage’s gaze was piercing. 

Buzzsaw’s wings were hunched, his neck curved, his flightplates hanging. He looked the very picture of misery. “You -- are you sure about this, Boss?” 

“Affirmative.” For the first time, Soundwave opened his hands--petitioning, rather than commanding. “Decision made. Query: risk too great for symbionts to remain?” It would hurt to the core of him to let them go, would leave scars that would pain him for as long as he functioned. But he had no choice. Carrier mecha commanded in almost all things, but never in this. And perhaps … it would be easier to let them go, hard as it was, than it would be to watch them die, fighting battles they were never framed for. 

Or worse, to have them die by his own hand. If all his plans and failsafes weren’t enough, if Parametric’s madness took root in him as well … he hadn’t glimpsed the range of his cohort’s individual fates, after all. And it would be many orn, perhaps even a quarter vorn, before Soundwave was sufficiently recovered to attempt another look into that abyss, to tackle the turbulent confluence of possible futures. 

Buzzsaw was the first to shake his helm, vocalization steady and certain. “We’ve been together a long time, Boss. I know you. This plan of yours -- it’s crazier than Ratbat. But I’m in it with you. I won’t leave.” He shuffled his slight weight from pede to pede, ignoring the glideframe’s indignant meep of protest from Soundwave’s other shoulder. “‘Sides which, ain’t no other carrier who can give scritches like you.” 

Soundwave inclined his helm in acknowledgement, unable in that moment to find any words at all. But something in him loosened, a knot wound too tight for too long, and a portion of his relief showed in his field. He wouldn’t lose all of them; wouldn’t be entirely stripped of his true function. 

“Yeah, you’re stuck with us, Boss.” Frenzy and Rumble bounced off their stool, running over to Soundwave’s pede and swarming up to the surface of the berth, climbing with their customary dexterity. “I t-told you, we’re gonna be the best symbionts ever, ain’t nobody gonna touch you. Can’t d-do that if we go someplace else,” Frenzy said seriously, looking up. 

“But that doesn’t give you license to be stupid, okay? That’s OUR job,” Rumble added, poking at Soundwave’s armored breastplate with one talon for emphasis.

“... affirmative,” Soundwave managed, reaching out to briefly touch the mechkin, to gather them closer. They grumped, but allowed the embrace, a measure of their agitation. They enjoyed their carrier’s touch as much as any of the others, but still didn’t like anyone to see it. 

As for his third mechkin.... “I’m worried,” Flipsides admitted, looking up. “But not about you. I’ve already seen what you’d do for us. You won’t end up like Parametric did. And...” the mechkin bit at his lip plate. “And I think I understand what you mean about those other cohorts. This war... its going to get pretty big, isn’t it? When we go to war on other planets, there isn’t usually much left. No libraries or things like that. A lot of ours could get damaged in this war, too.” The little mechkin leaned into Soundwave’s leg, feeling the solid strength there, thinking for a moment on what all of Cybertron could lose. A billion years of knowledge might vanish... unless symbionts could keep it safe. And so they needed other cohorts. 

“This... this is really important, isn’t it?” the mechkin asked, and Soundwave returned a solemn nod. Flipsides clenched his fists. “I believe in you. And in this thing you’re trying to do. So … no, I don’t want to leave.” 

Soundwave shuttered his optics briefly, his relief sweeping him. “Soundwave, will ensure that other tasks are found for you,” he said, stroking his talons carefully over that small helm in gratitude, recognition. He knew how deeply the mechkin had been affected by his trials in the tunnels below Iacon. “Fighting, not necessary for all of us.” 

Flipsides lifted his helm, inclining his faceplates into the touch and reaching up to cup that gentle talon closer. Soundwave would risk -- had risked -- everything for them. War would demand cruel things of Flipsides, of them all, no matter where he went. Best to face those demands beside a Master as thoughtful and attentive as Soundwave.

On the carrier’s shoulder, Ratbat turned to preen a wingplate, twisting the limb around so that he looked like a knotted-up ball. “Ratbat, requires time to decide?” Soundwave inquired after a moment.

“Wha -- don’t look at me! I’m not going anywhere!” chirped the glideframe, irate, little wings flailing. He clamped down harder on Soundwave’s shoulder fairing, lest anyone try to pry him off. He’d already seen what a lot of trouble it was to change carriers, even if any were as interesting as Soundwave. Which they weren’t. "I already told you, we're gonna be great together. Just you wait and see!"

Ravage and Laserbeak watched him. His two eldest, his jewels without price, treasured down to the very core of him, their fields and forms imprinted on his spark. They both guarded the knowledge of a planet, aeons of culture and art, of history and science. Both of them had seen Transit’s memories, and Ravage had engaged Parametric in battle. Neither of them could mistake the risks they, or he, faced. 

Soundwave could not imagine being without them... and couldn’t imagine allowing them to take this chance with him. 

But it wasn’t his decision to make. 

“Hey, guys,” said Flipsides. “Can you come help me look through the medical supplies, see what we’re going to need? We can leave everyone else to talk.” Flipsides looked to the glideframe on Soundwave’s shoulder. “We can count all the things, and organize them too,” he added, knowing that there was little the other symbiont liked better. Except maybe naps. 

“B-but I wanna--” started Frenzy, cutting off as his brother cuffed him. Squabbling, both mechkin made their way off the berth, and went to join Flipsides. Heaving a put-upon sigh, Ratbat glided down to join them, landing heavily on Rumble’s shoulder plates. Buzzsaw glanced between Soundwave and the other symbionts, and then joined the mechkin without a word, launching himself to glide out the hatch. 

Ravage’s tail twitched, the heavy flail there scraping against the floor plating as he suppressed the need to pace. 

Laserbeak shuttered his optics for a moment. “You spoke of allowances,” he said quietly. “What did you mean?” 

“Soundwave: has reviewed Pitch’s observations. Initial hypothesis: Parametric was overwhelmed by initial flood of inputs, unable to recover before core coding was irreversibly corrupted.” Soundwave hesitated. In truth, he would have wished for a decavorn or longer in which to gather additional information, to study the device and consult mecha more expert in its use. But with Cybertron on the brink of civil war, that was now impossible. Soundwave would have to proceed with nothing more than simple observational data and guesswork to go on. 

“Soundwave: has superior data processing, far greater bandwidth than Parametric. Projective plane module, may be used to damp initial flood of data, aid in successful integration. Consultation with medics, may reveal other possible precautions.” 

“May?” Ravage pounced upon that weakness, scarlet optics narrowed. “You are risking your life, our cohort’s safety, on something that *might* work. Whatever scrap of protection this thing might offer us, it isn’t worth such a risk. Master, this war … as bad as it might be, it is just another war. Mecha will die, Towers might burn, but it will pass. All we need to do is to survive, and we will have the chance to rebuild.”

Faced with the ancient knowledge in those words, Soundwave could only shake his helm. “Ravage … this war, unlike any other. This war--” he hesitated again, not wishing his fears to seem overblown, the irrational terror of a young mech facing the battlefield for the first time. Finally he said simply, “This war, far greater. Possibility exists: Cybertron, may not survive.”

“Hyperbolic excesses are not constructive here,” Ravage snapped, claws flexing in the pitted flooring. “Parametric lost more than his sanity -- he lost *himself.* The thing that took root in him....” He shook his head, audials laid back as if to flick the memory away. Soundwave knew it, had seen what Transit experienced as well... but he did not have the perspective of a symbiont, clearly didn’t understand how fundamentally *wrong* that memory was. Feeling a carrier reaching, taking by force what was not given... it was monstrous.

And yet not nearly so bad as the thought of losing Soundwave entirely. His carrier, Ravage’s, trained and shaped and beloved from the time he was little more than a mechling -- Soundwave was something not quite like any other carrier, was irreplaceable in a very real sense. For Soundwave to risk himself so needlessly, so foolishly was simply beyond the pale. 

“And your death would be no swifter than Parametric’s,” Laserbeak added, clacking his beak in agitation. “Parametric’s device could use your bandwidth to taint you more thoroughly. The berthformer’s plane module can only offer you a reflection of yourself, after all. Viewing your own code will afford you little if that code has been corrupted.”

“Your assertions, correct,” Soundwave said soberly. “Other precautions, also necessary. Soundwave’s core coding, will be safeguarded elsewhere.” It was no small thing; such a copy would give another mech access to everything Soundwave was, everything he had ever been, would contain every datawall, every guardian protocol and piece of ICE his systems possessed. Even code specialists, those mecha trained in identifying and correcting damaged code, were rarely entrusted with such things due to the inherent risks involved. A missing fragment here, one bit of data misremembered or encoded wrongly there, and it would be all too easy to introduce a fatal cascade of errors into the subject-mech’s system. Or worse, a mech could use that copy to hack the subject mecha’s very core coding, pry loose every memory file, every secret, and damage them beyond any recovery.

Laserbeak flinched at that suggestion. “Master--you are not seriously considering giving *Stent*--”

“Negative.” Soundwave regarded them both levelly. “Soundwave: will only trust our cohort with such a task. In addition--” he vented harshly, steeling himself for what he was about to ask. “Soundwave: will not risk the possibility of harming you. If Ravage, Laserbeak agree: both will be given two encrypted virus-spikes. The first: designed to shut down a carrier’s laser core, triggering stasis-lock. The second…” He met the two elder symbionts’ horrified optics without flinching. “The second, will shut down spark core containment.”

“You … you want us to …” Every plate of Ravage’s frame was hackled, his field roiling with instinctive negation. He took one step backwards, then another. “This--”

“Soundwave: must safeguard you,” Soundwave said urgently, willing them to understand. “This decision, not made lightly. Field-reading module, essential for our survival. If integration fails … cohort safety, still of paramount importance. Soundwave’s death, preferable to corruption by Parametric’s madness.“

Ravage wheeled to pace, no longer able to keep himself from that restless motion. 

Laserbeak shook his finely-crafted head, a quiet keen of sorrow building in the back of his vocalizer. Every time he bared his docks, Soundwave held him -- held them all -- in the cradle of his own spark. They knew him, down to the core. How could they ever bear to extinguish that sanctuary? A symbiont was not made for terrible choices like these. And even leaving the sheer horror aside, how... how could Laserbeak do such a thing to the rest of the cohort? “I cannot countenance such an act, Soundwave! If this war does reach as far as you believe, then your life is more important still. Ratbat, especially, is unlikely to survive a major conflict without you.” To say nothing of Flipsides and the other two mechkin, although they, at least, were sturdy mecha. 

Soundwave dipped his helm in solemn agreement. “If Soundwave fails, many cohorts in grave peril, including our own. Results, the same... if Soundwave does not try.” 

Laserbeak’s vocalization was a bell-toned whisper, stunned by this revelation. “What have you seen?” the flightframe asked. 

Soundwave hesitated, reluctant to subject his symbionts to that tattered maze of darkness of pain and failure. Even when placid, the divinations glimpsed through Ratbat were never easy for a symbiont to view -- everything about them was mathematical conjecture and shifting probabilities, with nothing solid, nothing real.

Ravage wheeled from where he stalked the wall, and prowled to stand in front of Soundwave once more, the blades of his frame an upright forest of razored edges. “And if I forbid this?” the symbiont growled, every part of him tensed.

Laserbeak stilled. Ravage’s few, simple words stretched a symbiont’s prerogative far, far past the breaking point. The carrier chose the way -- the symbiont’s choice was simply to follow, or to choose to unwind himself from the carrier. Above all others, Ravage knew this.

So, too, did Soundwave. The carrier curled his talons against the edge of the berth, metal scraping metal, just lightly. A waiting silence stretched between them all, heavy with unspoken choices.

And then he levered himself off, to kneel before Ravage. He reached out to stroke the bladeframe’s heavy head, cupping with both palms. His vocalizer crackled, ragged at the edges, hardly more than a whisper. “Ravage... must not ask this. Please.” 

Shivering finely, the big bladeframe pressed himself into that embrace, chest against Soundwave’s shoulder, chinplates hooked over his Master’s thick pauldron. “Master … show us what you have seen,” he said finally. 

Soundwave nodded slowly. And unlimbered a pair of primary datacables. 

Laserbeak and Ravage waited, unmoving as the cables socketed into place, as they were connected once again to their carrier. Soundwave’s cortex enfolded them both, the touch of his mind and spark as familiar as their own, even as his field roiled with apprehension and regret. 

He did not reach for the vivid, endless wells of their memories. This time, Soundwave opened his own, inviting the two symbionts into the vastly complex relays and networks of his own processors, his hard drives. Once again, Soundwave walked the futures spreading before them all, remembering as clearly as he was able. And, all three together, they bore witness--

_\--to Ravage, sleek frame burdened by a warframe’s armor and a warframe’s brand, his head low, his helm heavy and misshapen, almost unrecognizeable under the bristling of his weaponry. Only the predatory grace of his frame was the same, the slow stalk of a bladeframe on the hunt--_

_\--death and death and death, all around, the bodies of mecha piled high where cities had once been, where life had once flourished. They were only three now, three guttering sparks huddled together in the wasteland that had once been Cybertron--_

_\--Towers falling, flames racing across the sky--_

_\--symbionts caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, victorious warframes returned, dripping with energon as they twisted Rumble’s arm from its socket, joints tearing, laughing as the mechkin screamed--_

_\--gestalts roaring as they battled each other, heedless of the smaller mecha that fought and screamed and died beneath great crushing pedes--_

_\--Soundwave thrashing in desperate rage as warframes pinned him down, while cruel talons wrapped around Laserbeak’s shining wings--_

_\--battered, but they were whole, bearing the civilian brand of the Senate, of the Prime’s service. Whole and together and they had won, they were victorious … and they had lost everything. For they were the last, alone, outcast from the burnt cinder of their world, bearing witness to their Prime’s despair and the darkness of the Final Age--_

_\--turning, Soundwave desperately reaching for new possibilities, searching for hope, for a future, and finding only death, again and again--_

The memory of his journey was not clean, was dizzying in its scope, twisting through possibility after possibility as Soundwave had experienced them, until all three of them were shaking with remembered echoes of future-grief, future-despair and death. Soundwave looked again, as he had countless times before, reliving what he had seen, searching for some other glimmer of hope …. but there was nothing. Until... there, a single splinter of possibility.

These memories were more tattered still, worn with Soundwave’s exhaustion, mere glimpses into the maze of possibility. But they all watched as Soundwave _\--cradled the device in his talons, watching the way the thing’s narrow, twining hooks flexed and reached in his hands--_

_\--Confusion. A journey over white. Strength. Reaching up to wrap dark, blunted fingers around the Lord Protector’s pale talons. Mecha falling back, faceplates twisted in fear. Vast plans, schemes crossing the universe. Knowing. The winged sweep of a warship, the dart of smaller shuttles. A warframe’s brand, chiseled and enameled in purple with the kind of painstaking care born of terror--_

And just there, impossibly brief, a glimpse... the impression of waiting sparks, of hope long guarded and banked. It was the tiniest glimmer in the darkness ... but it was real, nevertheless. 

Soundwave let the data transmission end, his cilia drawing back inside their sheaf. He unlocked the blades of his multitools from Laserbeak’s port, and then reached to catch the flightframe as Laserbeak launched himself with an ultrasonic keen. _//Master!//_

Ravage, too, trembled, silent and pressed close as Soundwave gathered Laserbeak into the same embrace, bowing his helm over them both. Laserbeak shivered hard as Soundwave stroked and soothed, caressing the symbiont’s wings closed, crading the whole of the flightframe’s chassis against the armor of his chestplates, where the placid lap of his field was strongest. _//So... so terrible! How can … so much lost -- the libraries, the music halls of Tarn.... I n-never thought … //_ the flightframe gasped, vocaliser too broken with static for speech. 

Soundwave knelt with them both, silent, holding them while they both grieved in their own ways, mourning the loss of a future beyond war. He would have given anything, in that moment, to negate this fate. Anything to craft for them a better future. 

But that choice had never been his to make. As his symbionts’ trembling finally eased, Sounedwave stroked his talons over the complex mechanisms of Laserbeak’s helm, his shuttered optics. “Query: would Laserbeak.... do Soundwave the honor of guarding his carrier’s core coding?”

“Surely … surely there is another way. Surely you can beg an audience, tell them what you have seen. The Prime …” Laserbeak’s voice trailed away even before Soundwave shook his helm. “They … would not believe us, would they?” He huddled closer. “They did not listen before, when you were an Archivist. Now … they would have even less reason.” 

“Laserbeak: is correct,” Soundwave said quietly.

A tiny keen of despair escaped before Laserbeak could stop it. He pressed the top of his helm hard against the heavy plating over his Master’s spark. Then after a long moment, he lifted his head, seeking out first Ravage’s optics, then Soundwave’s. “If we must do this … then you will not do it alone. I will safeguard your code, Master, and your life.”

“As will I,” Ravage said, every plate of him tense and still, scarlet optics burning. “We will battle together, Master; and you must fight for yourself every bit as hard as you would for us, for we will not leave you.” 

Soundwave inclined his head in acknowledgment, unable to hide the depth of his relief. “Soundwave: is honored by your trust,” he said, feeling their fear and their faith in equal measure. This was only the start of a very long road, he knew. And at the end of it, they would not be the same mecha they were now. 

But they would survive, and see this through to the end. 

All of them, together.


	2. Chapter 2

The decision had been made. 

Soundwave laid his plans, made arrangements. His absence from the day to day workings of the arena would be noticed; an unavoidable risk. Precautions would need to be taken. He reached out to the few remaining carriers in Kaon for assistance, should Clench decide to take advantage of Soundwave’s absence. His network of information, of favors owed and given, was weaker than it once was--but with the sharp optics and keen wits of his cohort to keep any rivals at bay, his leverage would last, Soundwave judged, long enough for him to recover. 

Assuming he did. If he did not … he attended to that possibility as well. Analyzed it, fitted it into his calculations. He laid contingency plans for his death; then he set it aside.

In this, Soundwave would not allow himself to fail.

  


*********

  


In the darkness, a clock cycle clicked over, and core coding came online.

Highest in his processing queues, carrier protocols executed first: reaching out for cohort bonds, sending queries. They found seven symbionts, uninjured and nearby. This most basic level of coding was too primitive for emotion, but incipient combat protocols relaxed at that contact, falling back to allow other codes to execute, other checks to be made as intertwined systems came online. 

Systems diagnostics reported back with minor damage: unnaturally-precise fissures, welds where much of his central armor had been peeled open, angled docks temporarily taken out of alignment, then replaced. Still, all of his internals were still there, still functional. Pumps clicked over, coolant circulating as the power draw increased. As more systems readied themselves to come online, system checks encountered increasing numbers of medical inserts; blocks and throttles meant to prevent recovering systems from being overloaded, code that would decay over time. 

Surgical code. 

Unarchived memory-files came to the fore, quicker to access than archived long-term memory nodes. The few breems before stasis were clear, vividly etched into his cortex -- this hardware, at least, had suffered no damage. Core coding parsed the information there, found images and sensations it did not comprehend: the crawling sensation of newly installed code, deeply embedded beyond any possibility of removal. Images of a medic’s multitooled hands, cupping an angular, barbed device, silver-pale as the plating of a dead mech, covered in a scrawling of runes. The warm light of a spark, its veil of containment eased aside by a medic’s careful touch. Those hands, lifting over the opened wings of Soundwave’s chassis. The sound of a final question, and a reply. Then, the final sight of the bright, worried optics of his symbionts, his cohort, watching over him as he sank into the darkness of medical stasis .... 

To his core coding, none of it registered fully as a threat, but the sheer strangeness of the images left him uneasy, guardian protocols belatedly stirring in recognition of the intrusion. Again the priority queues reshuffled, power rerouting to warm higher processors, those quantum relays that gathered information and powered thought. 

All of bootup, from inception to this moment when the processing architectures gathered their initial charge, took only astroseconds, mere moments. And then Soundwave’s full processor suite--the entirety of his multithreaded cortex, his memory cores, his sensory arrays--came online. 

Along with... something else.

Soundwave awoke, and the world came crashing in. 

This wasn’t the familiar place he had known for vorn. The confines of the arena’s medbay had been replaced with a hazed, nauseating labyrinth of code, with an onslaught of overlapping inputs, of transmissions and thoughts and comms and whispers that screamed in his audials, a universe of unadulterated *noise*. Soundwave reached out, his core coding coming to the fore even as he reeled under the influx of data, reflexively trying to engage, to sort and categorize, to impose order upon the chaos. 

But for the first time, in all the long vorns of Soundwave’s existence … there was just too much. Too many inputs, too much data, too quickly. His processors had been online for barely a nanoklik, and already he was struggling, internal errors adding to the relentless cascade of information. There was … it was … to what was he to listen? 

Code was *everywhere.* Rising up off of every mechanical surface, so thick the indefinable haze cloaked the physical objects which issued the commands. Much of it moved -- drifting clouds of code like miasmas, stopping, moving on... other mecha, and he could see them... sense them through the very walls despite the distance they kept. Soundwave had thought his plans carefully laid, had calculated exactly how far away from other mecha he’d need to be kept, how much shielding to place around the room.

He had been wrong. 

If he could seize a moment, a fragment of peace amongst this madness, he could solve this. Could plan a way around this, could try to throttle the storm of input. But how could he focus when everything pounded down upon him, when he could hear every whisper of a passing Seeker’s internals, every grind and jitter of the cleaning drone in the main bay? He could taste Stent’s weariness from the next room, his fear and the anger he used to cover that fear _-slagging Chronicler can’t believe I fragged I’m so fragged how low can I what if he dies what will Clench do if no I’m still useful still necessary but for how long how long can I do this I’m tired, so tired of this fragging-_ and over that, other echoes of worry, of love _-master boss master so still what if he dies why did we master master master-_ and instinct and fear had him moving. His symbionts needed him. He could feel how much they needed him, their anxieties drifting like tattered wings around them. 

He was on his pedes, cables unfurled--when had he left the table? It was difficult to check his memory files, to know what was his under the bombardment of other mecha’s thoughts, their idle whims and memory-checks _-he had outflanked that damn tankframe in the last bout, he knew he had, no matter what Whiplash said, and it wasn’t his fault the fragger’s helo buddy got the drop on them both, and if he had to listen to Whiplash whine about his plating one more time, he was gonna-_ Soundwave’s talons scrabbled, carving long scrapes in the thick plating -- a wall? The bulkhead seemed like gossamer, insubstantial compared with the overwhelming immediacy of the vortex of code around him, inside him. 

Time -- he needed time, a moment, a breath of leeway in which to remember. To come to himself, to shed this terrifying haze of input. 

A symbiont could provide him that space. When a carrier was sunk fully into the depths of a memory, no other input intruded. Feeling as if he were melting, Soundwave reached out, reached for the safety of his cohort, for the sanctuary of their wisdom....

...and someone was in front of him. Someone had been waiting. Soundwave reset his optics -- not sure when they’d flickered off, because it didn’t matter, he could see *everything* whether they were online or not -- and realized that this swirl of code was familiar, was Ravage. That he had been reaching for Ravage, that his First had been saying something, something lost in the noise, his stance poised and wary … why did Ravage look like that? What had his First seen …? 

Another memory, this one vivid, razor-sharp, cutting deep into him like an energon blade _-mad, a corrupted shell, a betrayal of everything a carrier was, and Ravage hated Parametric with a deep-burning fury. He understood the choice the carrier had made, understood what had driven him to it, even how it could have gone so wrong; but that could not keep him from hating what Parametric had done to Transit, and to Soundwave. How he’d hurt his Master, who always kept them safe, who always fought, always touched them with such care, who would never betray that sacred trust--_

Soundwave recoiled. He was lunging backwards before he even realized it, backing away from where Ravage waited. His backplates hit a wall with a metallic clang, and he pressed against that support desperately, shutting down audials, optics, every bit of sensory input he could. But offlining those sensors helped very little, not when there was still so much coming in. He--he had to find some way to think, to shut down the extraneous bits of data, to shunt them aside … but even as he came to that realization, he could feel the void deep inside, next to his processing cores. That alien pull, that reached out and grasped and clung to every comm-whisper, every scrap of code it could find, laying every secret bare….

What parts were Soundwave’s? What lines and directives belonged to others? Were these his talons, curling into the dented steel of the floorplates? He could read the commands that worked their motions, could see the ripples of code that flashed back in response -- pressure, temperature, resistance, strut integrity, percentage tensor flex, texture. Or were his talons closer, larger, clenching over a smoother surface, their codes and capabilities so close to identical that there was no telling between them? Curling metal flakes or the screech of metal across glass or cupped around a burden or examining multitools just beginning to show corrosion or --

\-- and not just fingers. Everything, everything, pedes and wrist joints, primary coolant shunts and a dozen different processor suites, seals, tensors, plating, sensory, optics --examining supplies turning to look behind cast sideways at a hesitant ally watching Soundwave redlining under closing clenching talons-- he heard them all and they all were his but which ones were *his*? Core temperatures rose, processors working desperately to make sense of the cascading inundation of threads. 

_//....? ...ter! Soundwave!//_ The intrusion was one more thing to handle, one more droplet of molten steel in a river of slag. _//--therm.... si.... venting!//_ Before Soundwave, a bladeframe -- who? no, no, Ravage -- flared his plating, vents and heat sinks exposed. The standard code to open those airways rose up from his relays like smoke, coiling, dancing, there and gone. 

Soundwave caught at some of those vanishing strands, felt them execute. Cursing and clattering issued from the next room; Soundwave felt Ravage’s plating click, small positioning tensors trying to open the vents wider still. Wrong, smoke haze burning wrong, and.....

 _//....and nothing else. Soundwave, focus on me!//_ Ravage snapped.

 _//Ravage ...//_ Soundwave whispered. Or perhaps he had only thought it. It was impossible to tell whether the words had made it out where Ravage could hear--and how could any mech hear anything at all, with twining, catching code tearing at their audials? Every system was working frantically, venting waste heat, running as hot as if he battled on the arena floor, his cortex sorting threads, discarding extraneous signals, trying to channel the onslaught of what he saw/sensed/heard … 

… and failing. 

It was like falling, like being sucked under by a riptide of molten slag. Soundwave flailed, drowning in a flood of inputs, desperately reaching for some stability, a lifeline--and seized upon his bond, the spark-deep codes that bound him to his cohort, and they to him. Of all the code that threatened to swamp him, there was no mistaking those sparks, each of them unique, beautiful and twined together into a latticework of light. Soundwave grasped at those bonds, calling out, feeling the echoes of his symbionts’ distress, their fear for him .... and then Ravage was there, sharp and dark and sure, his First’s mind slicing through Soundwave’s own terror even as bladed jaws closed about an outflung arm, biting deep. 

The pain was jarring, unexpected. But it was also his, only his and no other--and that knowledge steadied him, grounded him, if only for a moment. 

_//Soundwave. Listen to me. Only to me. Do you hear me, Master?//_

_//Soundwave: is … hearinglistening ...//_

_//Soundwave. You’re trying to process too much. Remember Ratbat? Remember going between, to see what might be? This is the same--don’t look, Master. See only us. Feel only us. We’re here. We’re real.//_ Ravage’s words were short, sharp--authoritatively simple glyphs that were unmistakable in their clarity. _//This thing--it monitors everything. YOU have to decide what’s important.//_

 _//Soundwave: is trying...//_ the carrier gasped, dry irony spiraling away in the maelstrom, torn apart like a flake of rust in the wind. Trying to sort the important from the unimportant, trying to track a path through the madness. Trying, yes, but failing in a way so fundamental it bypassed all processing, went to the core of him. 

A mechanical creature, some stunned part of him realized, could never really control a technorganic parasite. And it had been hubris of the worst kind to imagine he could. 

Codeleak had already begun; it felt like fire across his plating. His tensors and flexons responded to code that wasn’t, that couldn’t be, his own -- tiny devices jerking, twitching, commands both his and taken from his surroundings backing up and bleeding over and all far, far beyond his control. System after system rebooted, trying to shed their backlogs, stacks overrunning the moment they came online. The rapid stutter of system failures was its own pain, the arrhythmia of fuel and coolant pumps sending sickening waves of *wrongness* through his entire frame. 

Someone was warning other mecha to keep their distance, warning his other symbionts to move farther away, and some distant part of Soundwave was grateful for that. He’d have done the same, if he could only think, could only process. The image of what Parametric had become, once this corruption ran its course, was the only solid thing left to him, an icon -- a token against the encroaching darkness. He needed to avoid... to stay away from.... stay back stay whole stay....

 _//--Still!//_ a mechanism ordered, and sharp jaws closed around one of his lax cables, the multitools opening and closing, folding and refolding uselessly at the tip. Heavy talons pinned the twitching length of him against the cold steel flooring. 

Soundwave watched -- could do nothing but watch -- as commands flowered along strong struts, blossoming and withering, flowing in rivers, clouds.... Ravage was physically a simple creature, but even his limited hardware handled billions of commands each nanoklick. Soundwave’s own hardware responded as best it could to that codestorm, medical and dataports flinching open in mimicry. Just like Ravage’s....

 _//No!//_ Codecrippled, Soundwave could do no more than twitch, jerk, as the symbiont pressed the open datalink at his chest to the tip of the carrier’s cable. Operating on deeply coded instinct, cilia reached even as Soundwave attempted to retreat, to pull away/call them back/pressing forward, desperate for the relief from the howling of the world/terrified at the possibility of harming his First, his Ravage. 

The first tenuous connection was made, cilia slipping into familiar sockets, twining deep in an instinctive rush, and the world dropped away as Ravage opened his memory. It was a well that spanned uncounted ages, Cybertron turning again and again under his pedes, a million billion sharp-edged shards of experience and memory in which to bury himself … 

All the world dropped away, panic and pain vanishing like code ghosts. A carrier was built to attune every one of his senses to his symbiont in times like this, was built to live in the memory. The darkness of Ravage’s vast memory well was an insulating kind of peace, separating Soundwave from his own decaying hardware. The silence --especially after so much input-- was blessedly cool, sweeter than highgrade. 

Ravage was there, a sharp-bladed shadow, part of the substance that cradled him. _//Master. Let me give you a memory. Let me give you time, as we did for Transit.//_

The temptation was like no other. To stay here, stay in the quiet, to let the joys and sorrows of Ravage’s life muffle Soundwave’s mistakes, soothe his terror and the core-deep ache of coding as it slowly, inevitably corroded away. 

An image came, unbidden. A scaleframe, battered, tarnished gold, violated and betrayed, his mind and his spark peeled open by his carrier. Still loyal … and waiting to die. 

_//Transit.//_ The whisper was sourceless, tracing through every part of him.

_//NO.//_

Soundwave pulled back, tried to return, to disengage. And failed. He keened soundlessly, there in the darkness of Ravage’s memory. He had lost command of his external systems, even of his datacables. He couldn’t leave, couldn’t stop, and every moment that passed his will weakened, reaching for the allure of that sanctuary, caring less and less what it might do to the one who offered this refuge.

There was only one escape left, one way to ensure Ravage would not be harmed. Soundwave turned inward, to his deepest core. To code that was never touched save by a code specialist or a medic, code that supported his cortex, his very spark. Most mecha wouldn’t even know where to begin, how to alter such deeply-rooted processes. But Soundwave had spent the last orn designing the virus-spikes his cohort could use to defend themselves from him. Those viruses … had required openings, deliberate weaknesses introduced into his firewalls for the code to exploit. 

He used that knowledge now, keying the viral cascade. If he couldn’t think, if he couldn’t process the data the module was incorporating, then he also couldn’t harm Ravage. Couldn’t link into his First’s memory well, couldn’t abuse Ravage’s loyalty, his love.

The malevolent code unwound from the deepest layers of his root bios and executed, severing connections, pulling apart processing threads. Process after process dropped offline, stuttering to a halt, entire banks of processors and cortex cores going dark. Sensory input faded, became garbled, Ravage’s frantic calls _//-Master don’t do this you don’t nee-staklnkggggdddd-//_ warping, distorting into unintelligible noise. 

Noise. That was all the world was. Let it be noise, let it beat against him. Soundwave would no longer have the capacity to care. Internal systems stuttered, reverting to base coding as higher processes no longer sent their usual commands. Thought and intention disappeared into a sea of static-white noise …

...and in that sea, the devouring, corrupting pull of the module finally went silent.

  


*********

  


Soundwave had heard other mecha speak of stasis. That formless darkness where a mech’s spark waited, if the frame that housed it was too damaged to continue on. A place of timeless quiet between dimension-states, undefined and unknowable.

None of them, however, had ever mentioned it being quite so … white. 

He was … he did not know where he was. He only knew that he existed. Distantly, he thought perhaps he should know more than that, but the white was too bright, a blinding glare. Wind rushed constantly in his audials, a sibilant hiss of static, as if he were caught in the midst of a neutron storm he could not feel. 

Was this the Well? It was an unexpectedly lonely sort of reunion with Primus, if so. Perhaps he had failed, and this was the Pit. If so, it was no more than he deserved... though exactly what he might have failed at, Soundwave could not say. 

It had been important, though. 

The white was relentless. 

This was a space beyond pain. But even still, the scour of that white was not comfortable. It felt as if it should hurt, should burn as it pressed in, insistent and devouring, and Soundwave instinctively tried to retreat from it. In this formless white void, he had no way of orienting himself, of knowing whether he was going towards or away anything at all -- wasn’t even sure if he had legs, or pedes -- but what else was he to do? Give up, and float aimlessly in this blind place? 

A vorn could have passed, or a moment. There was no way to tell time, no chronometer, no external signs of motion. There wasn’t even any ground underpede, at least, none that he could feel. There was no room in this place for anything other than the scouring light, that hollow neutron hiss.

And then … there was the barest flicker at the edge of his awareness.

Like smoke, it was there and then gone. It had been dark and cool, a dynamic presence, something... different. He followed. Something of the white seemed to thin as he moved, resolving into a pale alien sun overhead, a vast optic that baked everything below. Sometimes, for a moment, the haze cleared further and he glimpsed the plain he crossed -- ash, perhaps, an undulating expanse of powdery white hardly different from the reflective mist around him. 

Those bare glimpses hurried him, set him on edge with an anxiety he could not name. Again the dark flash of motion, and Soundwave pursued, chasing that wisp of shadow. His surroundings gradually gained weight, took on forms, architectures rising from the void. Sometimes, now, there were traces in the white -- pale imprints, visible only for the rim of anemic shadow that each depression cast. The pedeprints trailed off, or changed course unexpectedly, avoiding hazards Soundwave could only guess at. Or perhaps they were leading him in useless circles. Regardless, he followed, drawn by a growing unease. 

And as he did, sensation sharpened, the glare growing more distant, the star above receding and taking the white with it, one gradual degree at a time. The increments were hard to track, hard to measure, but he could see more of his surroundings all the time. Oddly twisted shapes rose up out of the white, bare carbon that had been gnarled and warped, like the struts of a mech after some terrible conflagration. Another sensation intruded on the neutron hiss -- cold? With the cold came memory-echoes of pain and fear, and Soundwave stopped, reluctant to continue further, to experience that bitterness again.

The whiteness split, and an ancient shadow prowled from between the nothing. Eyeless, featureless, it was a thing of darkness and sharp-edged silence. It moved like liquid metal, and the light bowed down, and drew away from it. 

Soundwave found himself folded down on his pedes in that dust, reaching for the darkness. Even at this distance, he could feel the dark chill, a balm against his plating, new-found but bleached by that unrelenting light. It was beautiful, and he wanted it--needed it.

The distance between them shifted, disappeared. And the shadow was in front of him, so close he could almost touch … and Soundwave pulled his hand back before he could make contact, suddenly afraid. Memory-fragments floated to the fore: a love made monstrous, that corroded everything it touched …. He looked down at his talons, pitted and worn, surfaces bleached pale and covered in dust, and they suddenly seemed clumsy, fit only to rend and tear. 

The shadow waited, watching. Then it turned away.

_//-follow-//_

Soundwave scrambled to his pedes, made clumsy in his haste. The darkness was a coolness, a sanctuary. If it left him--! He hurried after it as it glided along, darkness curling like smoke in its wake, forming ancient glyphs that dissipated between one moment and the next. Coils of shadow, strokes of darkness, rising to whisper words now lost to the vocabularies of living mecha. 

_//-follow-come-this-way//_

The shadow was a living language, was a lexicon all of its own. Coiling glyphs built its mass, a substance made of smoke. At first it flickered, vanishing and reappearing, more an absence than a presence. But as Soundwave followed, its contours grew more defined, as if every step brought him closer to it in some indefinite way. And the more he watched it, the more he found complexities in the flickering glyphs -- whispers of movement, of motion, of the smooth stretch and flex of strong limbs, the rhythmic sequence of each step. He’d … known these once, Soundwave realized. He wanted to know them again.

The path was an exhausting one, ever upwards, more difficult the more he learned, the more solid he became. The twisted struts grew thicker around him, taller, and now they smoked too, wisps of senseless, meaningless glyphs rising up from their tortured shapes. They were confusing, gray eddies in the haze of white, distracting. Soundwave paused to try to make sense of the movement around him, those ghostly flickers....

...and when he turned back, the darkness was gone, vanished. He staggered, a terrible weight pressing him down in despair -- that ancient sanctuary, had it led him here? Only to abandon him in a place of gathering madness? 

Faint traces, smoke-filled imprints in the ash underpede, seemed to waver before his optics. Desperate, he lunged forward... and found the shadow there, silent, awaiting him. 

_-irrelevance-_

The thought/glyph/word seemed to be a rebuke, though Soundwave was not sure what for. For losing the shadow? Or for allowing himself to become distracted by the twisted wrongness around him? The latter seemed more likely, but the shadow offered no other explanation. It simply turned, gliding away with slow, deliberate strides.

_-follow-_

Soundwave followed. 

The ancient darkness became his lodestone, and he refused to take his attention from it again, even as the air around them dimmed, the glare lessening by degrees. At the edges of his optical range, he could see the twisted edges of the formations closing in around them. Turning into a thick tangle of sharp-edged, ragged barbs and slagged edges, they encroached upon the plain, blocking out the light, until the only clear space that remained was the way before them. The plain had become a labyrinth, tangled paths twisting through interlaced struts that clawed downward, smoking remnants of broken glyphs wisping off of razored points. It would be so easy to become lost in this, to wander without direction or destination, and that realization made Soundwave move even closer to the dark shadow that was his guide, not wanting to be left behind. 

A few times, Soundwave fell a step or two behind, and he tore his attention back to his shadow-guide again and again, learning to ignore the drifting code-patterns around him. He’d already tasted the abject terror of losing sight of his guide, and had no wish to repeat the experience. 

They travelled for an uncounted age, the shadow growing more solid as they progressed. Now Soundwave could see shapes in that darkness, glimmers of starlight, or perhaps of silver. They moved, formed patterns, and he thought he could almost see…

The more he studied his guide, the more Soundwave saw, the deeper he could read into the pacing rhythm of movement. In some ways, the glyphs that formed the darkness were impossibly simple, a haiku of purpose and intent, in comparison with the labyrinth of twisted and broken things around them. But if the lesson was simple, it was not easy to master, for each smoke-formed line was rich with unexpected depth, ancient meaning. 

So deep was Soundwave’s focus that the twisted formations thinned, then disappeared altogether, all without his notice, fading into a kind of distant background noise. At long last, his shadow-guide stopped at the edge of a clearing--no, a crater, blasted bare. Trailing glyphs wound about the dark guide’s base, spiralling upwards to form patterns. To form words, Soundwave realized … _/destination/_ and _/necessity/_ and _/danger-warning/_ all intertwined. 

_-here-_

The crater cupped a sphere, an... entity, a thing as gray as steel or sorrow. It pooled in the center of the vast blankness, as large as Soundwave himself, gleaming palely in the light, incongruous against its blasted and angular surroundings. On its silvered surface were gouges--stark runes, immutable and black, biting deep. These were not the same glyphs his shadow-guide had taught him. These were different, alien … and yet, somehow he knew them too. Could feel them reverberating against his plating, a frigid resonance of _/secrets-slavery-death/_ , a barbed chain that spoke of _/control/_ and _/obedience/_. Beneath that sphere wreathed coils, cables … datacables, Soundwave realized, impossibly long. They stirred, twisted against each other, slithered outward, reaching for the nearest formations to grasp blindly at them, at the broken, fragmentary wisps that rose from the closest edges. The reaching datacables twined about all the coding it could reach, encircling those fragments and breaking them away. 

The cables snagged their tattered treasures, tore them away from the whole, dragged them back to the sphere. Cupped within that scoured crater, it hoarded its new data, arranged bits in methodically fragmented stacks, nonsensical data interwoven into a nest, a mounded treasure trove of madness. And still those restless data-cables reached outward, seeking more.

Soundwave’s shadowed guide looked over its shoulder, _-grace-_ and _-strength-_ flickering in the motion. 

_//...what is it?//_ Soundwave meant to ask, but the glyphs felt strange, like things no longer capable of vocalization, shallow, inadequate labels for the horror he felt. There was nothing right about this mass, this barbed gray entity.

The surface of the bladed darkness rippled, smoke-shaded glyphs rising up in whorls of _-destiny-_ , of _-reluctance-_ and of _-caution-_.

 _-you,-_ said the darkness, a single chilling glyph that formed in the heart of it, that broke apart and blew away like ash. 

Soundwave shook his helm, mute in denial, blunted talons lifting as if to ward the very shape of the idea from him. But etched indelibly into his hands, he saw, were the same glyphs that scarred the gray hunger. They were scrawled upon him, carved like lines of fire on each edge of his plating. Sorrow was painted on every plate of him, a consuming and subsuming slavery, built for no purpose other than to know, and in knowing, destroy. 

The darkness waited before him, its gaze an endless depth--and those greedy cables reached for it. Reached for his guide, reached for the darkness that had led him back from the brink of nothing, that had taught him form and breath.

Soundwave knew what the gray thing wanted. Knew it suddenly, and wholly, knew it down to the core of him. This devouring gray sphere would drink the blackness down, would pry open every part of grace and mystery until nothing was left but ragged tatters, fragments that it would keep for itself, piled in senselessly amongst all the rest. 

Soundwave could never permit that to come to pass. Not so long as he had spark within him, not so long as he had limbs to stir. Never.

Without plan, without forethought, Soundwave lunged to meet the seeking tendril head-on. 

In an aeon of travel through this endless place, Soundwave had experienced no real sensation, had felt neither the hissing white wind nor the crunch of ash underpede. True sensation was part of the world he had left behind, was not of this place. 

But now, he remembered pain.

A thousand hooks caught at his fragile coding, the glyphs only recently learned and woven anew. A thousand biting mouths gnawed, worrying loose the new lines of code, swallowing them down. 

A soundless scream caught in his vocalizer as he fought, twisted, did his best to tear at those barbs even as they sunk deep into his plating, his code. A fury deeper than instinct kept him upright through the agony, kept him moving forward. He was the shield, the guardian. He had been sparked for this: to stand tall, to protect and defend his darkness, his sparks, his treasures. He fought, tore deep rents in the cables that tried to reach for that shadow, advanced with implacable strength. Ignoring what it cost, and refusing to fall.

More of those reaching cables joined the fray, targeting him now, tearing at limbs. Snarling, Soundwave battered them aside, but for each opponent he crushed, new ones sprung forth, until the crater was a forest of pallid gray barbs and cables, a thorny weave that coiled and struck from all sides. Soundwave sliced at them with talons, bit at them with dentae … and beyond that tangle, he saw the sphere. The source of this madness.

That, he suddenly knew, was the true enemy. That was the thing he needed to kill.

He lunged forward. Towards the waiting sphere, and the thing obliged him, its cables biting deep, coiling close, lifting and yanking him forward and pulling him apart. He might have screamed as he felt a shoulder-joint tear, sparking as struts were pulled loose, code torn and leaking--he couldn’t tell. But it didn’t matter. 

The sphere was before him, an alien wrongness at the heart of all things … and finally within his reach. In a whiplash of speed, his own cables unfurled and struck deep. They found the fine seams in that sphere, the weaknesses created by those scarred glyphs, deliberate vulnerabilities created to chain the slave, to leash the monster--and they clamped down, bored deep. Soundwave threw himself over that connection, battered at those walls with a vicious and desperate fury-- 

\--and he was inside, floating in an alien sea devoid of light or life. There was no spark here, no burning sun … only a desperate, devouring hunger. A black hole that consumed all that crossed its path, a rapacious instinct to learn and know and take that, given the chance, would pull apart the very stars to fill that endless void. 

It did not know consequences, or limits. It simply wanted. It had been made for no other purpose than to hunger, than to dwell in its own frustration and starvation. And that knowledge gave Soundwave pause.

His guide had spoken true -- some part of this was him, for its hunger was familiar to him, was an old thing, an old... memory? He reached for recollection even as he fought. Agony was a fire, brilliant white tongues burning up his processors -- and the gray thing was undeterred, felt nothing but what it had been made to feel. And yet, now that Soundwave was inside it, he could destroy it, he realized. He could tear it apart in the same manner that it consumed its surroundings, could halt this mindless contagion at its source. 

And yet.... 

He knew this hunger. Not in degree, perhaps, but in kind: frustration, a fundamental limitation, an inability to grasp or even to touch what it truly wanted. It was a slowly maddening desperation, boredom beyond any creature’s ability to tolerate. An... innocence. 

Like the hunger of a mechling with neural architectures arrayed in experimental new ways, whose ability to process data had far outstripped his ability to accumulate it. A mechling who had been unable to integrate anything more than the most basic emotional circuitry properly, yet had compiled and transformed his first full zettabyte in a single transfer within his first vorn. A mechling who had been half out of his processors with boredom, whose handful of slender datacables afforded him only scraps, the barest trickle of information, when he thirsted for a flood. 

He knew this hunger. 

In his shock, Soundwave hesitated, and that instant nearly cost him his life as the device assaulted him anew, grinding away at everything he was, everything he’d learned and become. Soundwave recoiled, then lashed back, but this time with a new purpose to his attack -- to delay, to fend off. _//Enough!//_ he ordered the grayness. But his glyphs dropped like stones into quicksilver, hidden currents tearing them apart, adding them to the senselessly mounded detritus. If this continued, Soundwave would cease to be. He would become nothing more than fragmented, torn scraps of code, piled up by the thing’s unthinking greed … and if he died, so did the alien sphere’s access to to the world. 

This thing, however, was blind to consequences. Cause and effect had no meaning in this place. This thing had never been coded, crafted... born for logic or foresight; it was incapable of identifying itself as the cause of its own misery. 

Shuddering under the sphere’s attacks, Soundwave felt more of his substance being pulled away. He felt … thin, attenuated. Exposed, as if his armor had been ripped apart, leaving only the threads of his protoform bared to an uncaring world. 

Desperate, he reached out, and wrapped the tender threads of himself around that void. He piled layer upon layer of his own code around the sphere, muffling the sensations that its cables sought, blocking the sweet taste of the data-fragments it found. If this thing was incapable of reason, of comprehension … then perhaps Soundwave could goad it into understanding. Under the mummification of his own insulating code, he felt the entity’s imperatives piling up, frantic reachings outward. It wanted, it needed new data, needed to hear to taste to feel, and Soundwave blocked every bit of code it tried to take, muffled every sensation, every fragmented thought. The sphere’s datacables flailed, uncoordinated and desperate, withering … and as they fell away, Soundwave relaxed his grip, allowing a tiny trickle of input. 

The sphere seized that input, devoured it. Hungry datacables sank deep into his vulnerable frame, tearing. And Soundwave slammed the opening shut, severed that thread.

Eons passed, uncounted cycles of time, the same pattern repeating, unvarying. The sphere tried everything at its disposal -- waiting for an opening, ambushing Soundwave a moment after he relaxed or a joor -- but always Soundwave’s response was the same. Action, reaction--when the alien sphere left Soundwave be, did as Soundwave directed, touched rather than tore, it was allowed the data it hungered for. When it reached too far, when it ripped at his code or reached for the ancient shadow that still lingered upon the crater’s verge--Soundwave clamped down, denied it the world, left it in the lightless hungering void.

The process was slow. Entire geologic ages passed before the thing seemed to … not understand, not quite, but to make the connection, to build the appropriate responses to Soundwave’s actions. 

Rebellion: left it alone in the hungry dark. Obedience: gave it data, allowed it a world full of input, data upon which it could feast.

It was a crude methodology, a simple binary of punishment and reward. And even long after the device had clearly learned that duality, it still turned on Soundwave when it could, when he turned his back or lost his focus for even an instant. But slowly, gradually.... control became Soundwave’s, until he commanded what the device reached, and how far, and what it might snap off in its avaricious grasp. His command was fickle, unsteady, yes... but he held the reins. 

One piece of plating, one glyph and line of code at a time, Soundwave disengaged from the device, reclaiming and repairing his form, reaching back into the white place where his guide still waited. And as he arose, the glyphs of slavery and dominion peeled from his plating, one at a time, drifting down, crisping pale as ash. They fell as flakes, white into white. 

Cleared of its bindings, Soundwave’s armor was as blue as the spaces between the stars. 

Sudden hope blossoming, the carrier looked up, searching for his guide. A sound gathered in his vocalizer. 

“Ravage?”

  


**********

  


Soundwave unshuttered his optics, and the world lurched sickeningly. 

A heavy shoulder pressed against him, keeping his chassis from collapsing onto its side. His tensors trembled as they went through bootup routines, as weak and uncoordinated as the hardware of a newbuild. His own coding crawled along his conduits, rising up in whorls and lines, drifts of smoke that tasted like intent and smelled like a hall of mainframes -- comforting, academic.

Rising wisps of coding wreathed Ravage, too. The symbiont had always been a wonder, of course, but seeing him now could move a mech to song, to poetry. Efficiencies buttressed efficiencies, simple as single-threaded thoughts and yet sweet as highgrade. Soundwave could only marvel at the grace made metal, the way this coil of strength worked together with that arch of neck and breadth of head, conspiring to produce a biting force that belied its simple origins. He knew every piece of the symbiont’s hardware, inside and out, but had never seen it like this -- each piece alive, functioning together, the fundamental symmetry of the whole. 

The cable between them was a deep white riverbed, dry now of all save the faintest blue-white trickle, but heavy with the promise of the data it could carry. Worry was orange, was a brittle-edged filament that paced circles between Ravage’s elegantly power-efficient processors, that urged the bladeframe’s tensors to motion and kept each limb taut and ready. 

There were other inputs too -- mecha walking by, or simple electronics within the walls, but they were uniformly distant to him, unimportant, a flow that parted around him and moved on. His focus was everything, the periphery meaningless. It seemed, for a moment, as if this should be strange to him -- Soundwave had always before had plenty of spare processing power to devote to pressing sensors to their limits. But that need had left him, and in point of fact, he had more than enough to calculate, just to make sense of all this input. 

And this time, Soundwave felt it when the device within him lashed out, striking at the thing he focussed on, trying to capture that orange flow of bits, to keep the coding for itself.

Muffling the module felt like second nature to Soundwave -- he’d done it so often, though he could not now say when or where. The beauty of Ravage’s coding attenuated before him, became nothing but a flicker, a background drift in the symbiont’s electromagnetic field. Soundwave drew a shuddering vent, his talons curling against the flooring, his joints protesting as they took his weight for the first time in.... he did not know how long. His chronometer had been reset. Along with all the rest of his coding, it seemed, right down to the root of him. 

“--what?” Soundwave managed, the glyph tattered and raw as his vocalizer completed its ever-glitchy warmup sequences. “Ravage … status?”

“I am unharmed, Master,” was his First’s reply, scarlet optics narrowed and intent upon his faceplates, the strength of the bladeframe bolstering Soundwave’s trembling frame. “I--I cannot feel it any more, that thing--has it been destroyed?” The module subsided, and Soundwave cautiously loosened his grip, marvelling as he felt/saw ripples of worry/anger/relief threaded in amongst that code, battle protocols warring with protective imperatives.

“Soundwave--” the carrier paused, taking stock. It was a unique experience, seeing his code from both without and within, watching the drifts of data even as internal diagnostics reported in. The module surged, straining against the reins of his control, and he tightened his grip, forcing that external view to recede. 

“Soundwave: is fine.” He sent a pulse of affection and reassurance through their connection. “Module integration, now complete.” Even if that integration came at the price of eternal vigilance. 

Still, it was a price Soundwave would gladly pay. He tried to lift a hand, to smooth the bristled plating over that strong neck. He managed to get only halfway, his talons shaking embarrassingly in the air, before Ravage huffed, and pushed his head under them. _//Rest, Master,//_ he said, winding his frame around his master. _//I shall keep watch.//_


	3. Chapter 3

The line of mecha awaiting kit and assignment stretched a quarter-filum down the blocked-off road. These were raw recruits, warframed mecha destined to fill a numbered position in a numbered company. Anxiety was a greenish haze over all of them, worry running in endless, aimless cycles through mass-produced processor architectures.

But at least they weren’t conscripts.

Those mecha were rounded up on periodic sweeps, which gathered every mechanism too slow or too stupid to flee the targeted districts. The luckless civilians were sent to replace the warframes now leaving Kaon’s metalworks, or performed other military duties too menial or dangerous to risk mecha with useful skills. Even empties could be goaded out to ‘disarm’ a minefield, after all--and no warframe wanted to be around when the commanders ran out of ‘volunteers’. The Lord High Protector paid well, to be sure, but a mech had to remain functioning to enjoy his pay.

These fighters waited patiently, by contrast. They had something to offer, had some value to the Decepticon army. Or so they hoped.

Most, focused on clinging to that nugget of hope, spared little notice for Soundwave at all. A few were more observant. But even then a Chronicler was nothing more than a _-curiosity-_ , an _-irritant-_ , a _-weakness/target-_ \-- and Soundwave plucked *that* mech’s designation from his cortex, marking the warframe well. Oxide.

 _-creepy fragger mob host tentacled piece of quintesson scrap thinks he’s so fragging smart just like all the others prancing around thinking they can be something well they can’t be anything not here should go crawling back to Iacon with all his little drones wherever they’ve gone but it looks like he wantsta sign up, no fraggin way he’s getting in Rebar’s too smart for that and won’t that be fun-_ Small, violent thoughts flickered across the Oxide’s processors in turgid, muddy drifts. Oxide turned to the warframe beside him, commed a joke that Soundwave could not read. But the carrier watched both amusement and distaste ripple across the other mech’s neural circuitry.

Strange, in a way. Encoded communications, protected by keys and algorithms, were still beyond Soundwave’s reach -- he could see them, but decoding them was another matter. Internal coding, however, normally well-shielded by layers of firewalls, stood out as starkly as clouds of smoke, their unencrypted glyphs numerous but clear. Separating the steel from the slag, of course, wasn’t always easy... but when the module cooperated, every mech was a revelation, was a fascination of decision trees and habits, all laid bare.

Soundwave tore his attention from the line of waiting soldiers, and went to find Rebar. Several lightly-armored warframes -- all of them bored and not bothering to hide it -- stood by to assist each individual volunteer with his placement. They ran basic scans, took down data, matched up old service records, and sorted the battered recruits into companies and training units. Soundwave bypassed them all, stopping before a smallish frontliner whose thoughts ran to supplies and logistics. “Tribunus Rebar,” Soundwave said, a confirmation more than a question.

Behind Soundwave, attention abruptly sharpened, like a babble of murmuring voices. It was easy to see why; Rebar was third-in-command of recruiting. He rarely handled mecha personally -- intervening only if a special-ops mech, a medic, or other highly-prized frametype showed up to join the Lord High Protector’s cause.

Rebar lifted a brow ridge, turned to study the mech before him, cataloging, weighing and measuring with narrowed optics. The tribunus was quite thorough in his duties, Soundwave noted. He watched the flickering of data as his measure was taken, every unusual feature noted: thickened armor, unusual sensor panels, scuffed plating combined with a healthy topcoat, the oddly broad configuration of cable housings, the simple shoulder-mounted sonic cannon. And no telltale signs of widened struts or powerline configurations to indicate where internal weapons might be housed. None at all. Fascinating, really, to see himself through the lens of this mech’s optics.

Dry amusement flickered over those thoughts, rising upward in lazy data-curls from Rebar’s frame. Soundwave estimated a sixty-three percent chance that Rebar would queue up mannerly subroutines, employing excessive politeness to disguise his mockery. He watched with interest as the commander spun up an old memory-node, accessed old routines. They were stored in a drive installed almost three hundred vorn ago, he noted -- just after the commander had taken a slug that left his third-quadrant power drives susceptible to glitching. “You have me at a disadvantage. What can I do for you... Chronicler?”

“Designation: Soundwave,” came the even reply. “Current objective, to enter the Lord High Protector’s service.” Soundwave stopped there, waiting for the disdain and mockery he knew would come.

“Is it now? And you thought you’d cut to the head of the line, is that it?” Rebar made a show of looking Soundwave over, every micron of his field showing clearly how unimpressed he was with what he saw. Soundwave idly noted the rising interest and amusement from both recruits and assistants alike, all of them more than happy to alleviate their boredom by watching an overeager civilian get his comeuppance. “I’m sure you were a very important little administrative cog, Chronicler, but I’m afraid we’ve got little use for electron-herders and data-crunchers here. So you can just take your fancy-plated aft back to the end of the line, and wait for your company assignment like everyone else.” Rebar’s battlemasked faceplates were impossible to read, but the dismissal was easy to hear.

Soundwave set his pedes, and did not move. “Soundwave: of more use than Tribunus Rebar realizes,” he said, watching those drifts of code change, scarlet-yellow threads of temper beginning to emerge from underneath Rebar’s well-controlled field.

“Chronicler, you don’t seem to understand how we do things here.” Rebar advanced on Soundwave. A full head-and-a-half shorter than the big carrier, he was fully as broad, far more heavily armored, and showed no signs of being intimidated by Soundwave’s size. “This is not a negotiation. You cannot weasel your way into a cushy duty-slot here by dropping names or backroom bargaining. Your JOB, Chronicler, is to stand where I tell you to stand, and do what I tell you do. And the next words out of your vocalizer had better be, ‘Yes, Tribunus,’ or I will see you admitted, only to personally bust your aft down to drone-wrangling duty! Got it?”

“Soundwave: poorly suited for drone-wrangling,” came the reply. Rebar’s response had been expected, calculated as it was to intimidate mecha into line. If Soundwave were still the archivist he once had been, it might even have worked. But after vorn watching Demolishor beat down veterans and newly-recruited gladiators alike, and even longer working with--and against--those same gladiators, Soundwave was unimpressed by Rebar’s ire. Especially since, despite his annoyance, the tribunus hadn’t bothered to queue up anything but the most tangential of battle-protocols.

All of that, however, could change in a nanoklik. And so Soundwave continued.

“Metrodash, much better suited to such an assignment.” He lifted a hand, indicated the mech in question--a mid-weight grounder plated in an unremarkable blue and black color scheme. “Battle processors, thoroughly corrupted by circadaleus vox virus. Code overlays, installed to conceal damage, boost battle-prowess. Adaptive coding, inadequate for long-term combat conditions.”

Metrodash bristled, plating shifting into an aggressive frontal configuration. “That’s a lie! C’mere and say that, you fragging--”

“Quake, possesses extensive battle experience. His debts, equally extensive and unforgiven. Creditors, include several high-level cadres of Tower Iacon. Their collateral: five more vorn of service by cohort-brothers.” Checking the tribunus’ active threads and finding a spark of speculative interest, Soundwave moved away from Rebar, naming mecha one by one.

“Breakdown, recently reformatted from civilian transport frametype. Public records, internal datastamps, both altered to hide this fact.” Soundwave paused briefly in front of the startled and snarling heavy warframe. “Connections necessary to achieve this, extensive, potentially useful.”

“Flywheel: formerly part of 392nd advance infiltrator cohort. Cohort, decimated at the end of the war. Surviving members, have sworn to kill him on sight.”

“Raze, Fuse, Manifold: all from the same sparking of manufactured warframes. Their batch, rushed into service. Their struts, improperly annealed, prone to microfissures. Most of their batch-brethren, decommissioned from service due to expense--”

“You fragger! I’ll put *macro* fissures in your fragging struts!”

“--of frame replacement.” Soundwave turned, facing Rebar once more, as if oblivious to the angry warframes at his back. He could feel the pressure of their hate beating against his backplates. Their battle protocols, weapons checks, and armor cycling codes rose upwards, wreathing together, fogging the air with electric charge and the threat of incipient violence.

“Tribunus Rebar. Such information, of no use to the Decepticon cause?”

The tribunus looked at Soundwave, then at the irate warframes. No fool, Rebar had already shifted his stance to combat ready, defensive systems active. Combat protocols churned through the data they could access -- the movements of the other warframes, their expressions, the heat of their weapons -- generating the options most likely to get Rebar out of the way when things went to the Pit. A prudent thread of calculations, Soundwave judged; the chance of the tribunus regaining control over the angry recruits was nominal at best, and falling fast.

Rebar’s optics narrowed, the the pop-grinding sound of tensed jaw struts clearly audible behind his battlemask as he surveyed the situation. “Well, ain’t that a sack of smashed diodes.” He looked to the clearly oblivious carrier. Stupid slagging civilian, making Rebar’s job harder than it fragging already was. “I leave the spooks to their own affairs, Chronicler; they recruit their own. And if a little database-combing didn’t impress them, it sure as the Pit ain’t gonna impress me.” The query he’d forwarded to intelligence, asking for an ID and verification on the recruit’s intel, was returned with a simple null -- no great surprise there. Special Ops hoarded their data like it was cybertronium; fraggers were worse than a clan of turbofoxes nested up in a box of new transistors.

Soundwave tilted his helm. “Information provided, not derived from databases,” he said flatly.

“No slag--it derives from fragging lies! That fragger’s making scrap up, trying to throw us under the treads! Well I say we -- “

“You there! You want the medics to install clearplate in your abdomen? Do you?” Rebar barked, finally losing his patience. “Why? Because you’re going to need it to see where you’re going after I shove your helm up your aft! Shut the slag up and get the frag back in line!” The warframes responded better than Soundwave expected -- many subsided. Some did not. Raze and Fuse would be problematic, and Oxide was eager for a fight.

“And you--chronicler, I’m gonna tell you this just one more time,” snarled Rebar, turning on Soundwave. “Crawl back to your hole before I have you dragged there like the smelted pile of scrap you are, and wait for the conscription gangs. That’s the best fragging offer a mouthy civilian like you is gonna get.”

Soundwave looked down at the irate warframe. “Dragging, not advised,” he warned calmly.

Rebar’s plating heated with fury.

The tribunus' anger was easy to read, even by the waiting warframes. Fuse was the first to break rank, eager to score a few points by removing the source of the tribunus’ ire. Powerfully-clawed talons lashed out for Soundwave’s arm, cords and lines of intention crawling over the limb, lighting tensors, bundling around force multipliers. Soundwave could see exactly where the warframe meant to grab, gauge the precise reach of those talons. “You stupid scraplet-eater, I’ll show you whose struts--”

But Soundwave was no longer there. His vorn in the arena had taught him a great deal, including how to be much faster and lighter on his pedes than most chronicler-carriers. He dodged out of the way, giving just enough ground that Fuse’s talons closed only over empty air. Soundwave was still far slower than most warframes, but advance warning more than compensated for it. Roaring, Fuse lashed at him; again Soundwave slipped out of reach, pivoting as he did so, sidestepping Raze’s charge as well.

Raze’s momentum took him headlong into the terminals set up to assist the recruiters. Metal crumpled like foil beneath the frontliner’s weight. Recruiters shouted, scrambled back, tried to restore order. Too furious to listen, Raze rounded on Soundwave again with a crackling snarl of frustration, even as Quake moved up from behind to box the carrier in. Further back, well clear of the melee, Oxide unfolded a heavy internal rifle, dentae bared in a vicious grin. His weapon’s mechanisms were bright nodes of coiling, unfamiliar data as they shuffled slugs the size of a mech’s talon into firing position.

All four warframes were towering clouds of coding, smoke-flickering, so rapid and so interlaced that the details were almost impossible to process. But large parts of the warframes’ base coding was standard, shared by most mecha, and Soundwave knew what should be there. As fast as thought, the carrier isolated a string of his own code -- a simple locking sequence, meant to keep limbs stable when a mech had to stand or hold objects for long periods. He held it clearly in his processors; then released his blocks, merging both intention and instinct, igniting the module’s need to take, to devour … and to control.

The warframes exploded into action, their frames hazed by combat protocols, battle processors calculating force and trajectory and expected responses. All the things they needed to batter one uppity chronicler to the ground, to tear off sensory panels, to crush that helm and rip apart limbs until their enemy was thoroughly offlined--

\--only to stutter to a halt as limbs locked, frames refusing to move as Soundwave took control, un-queued code executing enexpectedly to stiffen struts, to lock down pelvic joints and backstruts. A furious, incoherent cry escaped as Fuse crashed to the ground, unable to compensate for his own forward motion. The other two warframes were frozen, locked momentarily in place, their talons static in the air, tips a bare handspan from Soundwave’s faceplates.

“Whut the--”

“I can’t--!”

“Fragger,” Oxide snarled, unaffected by the strange attack. He lifted his arm, the plasma rifle on it unfolded, glowing blue with charge. “Let’s see you play games with this!” His internal systems reported a solid target lock. Soundwave could see the numbers, cycling up, focussing down on Soundwave’s chassis, wreathing the barrel, barbed scarlet fractals of incipient violence, bare and vulnerable. He reached for those targeting responses, felt the module pull them in. Then *twisted*, just so.

Oxide fired.

Soundwave watched him, standing tall and unflinching as Rebar and the other warframes around him ducked away, scrambled for cover, shouting furious orders to stand down. The plasma bolt seared past his shoulder, close enough to heat the surface of his plating, and punched into an unprepared Quake’s chestplates. Soundwave didn’t wait for either of his attackers to recover. Pivoting on one pede, he grabbed the staggering warframe by one pauldron, dragging him around. A primary cable whiplashed out, the bladed tip spearing through Quake’s punctured armor.

The sheaf of bright arctic cilia invaded, pushing around and past the spent slug embedded in Quake’s tertiary quantum drive. Quake could only jerk, still striving to overcome the limb-locks. And as each cilia forged its connections, Soundwave’s view of the frontliner’s code cleared. Every line was now crystal-sharp: every work-around, every system, every firewall. A code-specialist could have cleared the latter with a neat virus-packet; unleashed, the telepathic module simply ignored the barriers. Soundwave reached, found weapons-systems, activated the grounder’s arm cannon. Overriding the weapon’s defenses and blocking Quake’s own access now took only a moment’s thought, a bare flickering of intent--and then the cannon was his.

Oxide took a cannon-blast to the faceplates almost before he realized the other warframe had turned against him. Raze and Fuse fared little better, a quick succession of shots taking them out at vulnerable joints, knocking them off their pedes once more.

At long last, Quake managed to work a partial reroute around his own locked coding. The warframe roared, hammering a furiously uncoordinated blow at Soundwave’s thorax, clawing at his primary cable. Soundwave knew better than try and match a warframe’s strength. He released Quake, the multitools of his cable screeching across optics and sensitive sensory projections in a painful whiplashing blow, even as he reached again. His brief contact had given him Quake’s internal processes, showed him the structure of the warframe’s systems, the weaknesses. Soundwave used that now, stabbing inward to the grounder’s core data. Even as he retreated physically, Soundwave introduced overruns, twisted normal processes into a warped cascade that overloaded higher processors and sent Quake collapsing to his kneeplates, both hands clutching at his helm.

Soundwave stepped to one side, and surveyed his work. Oxide would most likely need a medic’s attention to restore full functioning of his primary optics. Raze would apparently require help to regain control of his limbs, and Fuse was going to need that frame replacement sooner rather than later. Still, none of the warframes were offline, or even permanently damaged -- though all had been thoroughly humiliated. As angry as the recruits were, it was almost certain that several would attempt to assault Soundwave again--just as soon as they could move.

Soundwave had been inside Quake’s systems -- all of them. And so had the module. For a single long moment, the carrier considered granting the module still more leeway, letting it shut down the warframe’s spark containment field. Deactivating Quake now could solve more problems than it created....

Tribunus Rebar, however, had reached the limits of his tolerance. As had the other Deception warframes pressed into recruitment duty. Their weapons were now fully unfolded, battle-systems live and humming with the promise of further violence. They waded into the fight, ordering the other recruits back into line, strong-arming those who didn’t move fast enough, separating the combatants with a judicious application of threats and aft-kicking. Oxide --clearly not a fast learner--tried to lunge at Soundwave again, only to receive a fist in the faceplates for his trouble.

Soundwave did nothing, stood unmoving as the shouting, shoving mob kept a wary distance from him. Ignoring the weaponry being waved in his direction, he turned, inclining his helm respectfully to Rebar. He commed a file to the dumbfounded warframe with the same studious politeness with which the tribunus had spoken to Soundwave. “Soundwave: offers his service to the Decepticon cause. First Dux Demolishor, has recommended placement in communications.” A recommendation from a high-ranking officer could be quite an asset... if the recruiters chose to consider it. The chance of one doing so, once he noted Soundwave’s frametype, had been vanishingly small. Hence the demonstration.

Rebar gave the document due consideration. Comm transmissions clustered thickly around him, flickering in and out of view.

Soundwave gave the recruiter a few moments. Then he gestured subtly to where Fuse -- shoved bodily back into line -- was doing his best to stand upright on uncooperative limbs. Fuse had managed to overcome Soundwave’s limb-lock coding... but all could clearly see the strut fractures the warframe had sustained. Just as Soundwave had predicted. “Your assessment, unchanged?”

Silence. Soundwave saw himself as the warframes saw him -- untouched, without a single scrape, silvered cables arched and still like serpents before a strike. He’d barely moved over the course of the fight, only a step or two, certainly not enough to miraculously dodge a point-blank plasma slug. And four warframes of at least some small talent had fallen to him.

More than that -- they had been hacked. Without a touch, without equipment or code. It was impossible, just purely impossible. No mech could do that; no known frameclass had that ability.

Comms and whispers raged like a fire in an energon distillery, blossoming into rumor before Soundwave’s very sensors. 

"--never even felt the hack --what the frag *is* he?! -- heard about one of them mob bosses, led the riots at Iacon -- Primus, still can’t fragging move -- saw a vid, there was a tentacle mech standing right next to Him at the arena...." Weapons wavered, none of the encircling warframes willing to get too close, none of them quite certain what to do with Soundwave.

The tribunus held up a hand, optics narrowed. Orange worry flashed in telltale desperation between his processor nodes -- he was stalling for time. “Last I’d heard, Chroniclers weren’t much for hacking,” Rebar said.

“Talent, unique to Soundwave,” the carrier allowed. It would not serve his goals, after all, if the Decepticons attempted to ‘recruit’ other carriers in the hopes of uncovering more telepaths.

“I see. And how did you come by this unusual... talent?” Incoming comm sensors lit up, unpacking a short datafile. A virulent green joined the tribunus’ many active threads. Jealousy? No, rather exasperation, aggravation at the frankly stupid orders from those higher up the command chain. Or rather, a single order, from a single officer.

Soundwave focused in on that, picking apart the electrical impulses, sieving meaning from the flow. He plucked a name from the surface of Rebar’s processors. “Query: Legati Schism, a patient mech?” he inquired.

The tribunus froze. That name had ignited thousands of thoughts in the warframes around Soundwave, very few of them positive. Schism was apparently special ops, neuralanalytics division. Not interrogations, at least, but almost as feared. From the rising buzz of tightly encrypted comm-whispers, the warframes around him weren’t at all sure that kind of attention was necessarily a good thing.

Rebar finally nodded, talons curled into fists at his sides, his glyphs flat and uninflected. “Welcome to the Decepticons, Decanus Soundwave. You’ve been assigned to a post in communications.”

Soundwave inclined his helm graciously. Decanus was the lowest possible officer rank -- no more than he’d expected, but less than he’d hoped for. It would be a wonder if he was placed in any position of authority at all. Still, it was enough to gain entry to at least a handful of systems, to begin making himself and his cohort indispensable. Or, at the very least, to become too firmly entrenched to be removed by force. “Accommodations, access badges, required for eight.”

“Eight! The frag you--”

Armor hissed as warframes down the line shifted, twitching in alarm. As silent as a foxfire ghost, a long-limbed bladeframe stalked from between two warframes, seeming to detach itself from the shadows, all sable, silver, and symmetry. Its back came knee-high to even a large mech, and it held its head low, as if on the hunt.

Ravage had been close enough to hamstring a mech, and not a single one had detected him. Nor had they noticed either of the two waiting flightframes, which detached themselves from the darkness of an overhanging eave, spiralling downward to land on their carrier’s shoulders. Buzzsaw was a tight bundle of ferocity and battle calculations, trailing targeting glyphs rimmed in the lace of physics. Laserbeak was golden with delight, with relief and pride. The flightframe hadn’t seen such a fine bit of grandstanding since the standoff of Kreem Five.

The rest of Soundwave’s cohort wasn’t far behind. Rumble, Frenzy and the others had been told to keep their distance, to be ready to create a diversion if Soundwave’s gambit had gone awry. Now they appeared, emerging from the back of the crowd of warframes. Rumble and Frenzy flanked Flipsides, who carried a bright-opticked Ratbat. The two younger mechkin appeared to be oblivious to the threat the surrounding warframes posed, guarding their mechkin brother with a gleeful air of incipient mayhem. Rumble, Soundwave noted with mild surprise, had somehow managed to acquire a thermal grenade. Walking by a particular recruit, the mechkin smacked him on the leg.

“Hey. Lose something?” Rumble tossed the grenade upwards, a feral grin on his faceplates. “Catch!”

“What the--oh frag!” Caught off-guard, the recruit scrambled to catch the device before it could hit the ground. He inspected the surface, a flare of alarm lighting up his field. “Wait a nano--this is mine! How did--you little fragger! I’m gonna--” The warframe took a step forward--then thought better of it as he glanced nervously where to Soundwave stood, cables still poised. A nearby Decepticon hefted his carry-weapon meaningfully, as well... and Soundwave was relieved to see that the recruit's fear of the silent chronicler was nearly as effective as his fear of the recruiters' authority.

Rumble laughed, scrambling to catch up with his brothers, until they were all at the head of the line, safe in Soundwave’s shadow. Rebar’s anger, Soundwave noted, had faded somewhat as the warframe watched their approach, replaced with … speculation?

Soundwave turned, Ravage at his side. Laserbeak and Buzzsaw fixed Rebar with their own predatory crimson stares, and Rumble and Frenzy flanked their carrier as if they were warframes themselves. The large carrier saluted, bowing his helm.

“Soundwave and cohort: reporting for duty, Tribunus.”


	4. Chapter 4

“What I fragging need is five more competent comptrollers. Do you know what I *didn’t* need? A single fragging history professor who’s going to need a vorn of training and is fragging gonna take up as much room and energon as *eight* good mecha, that’s what I didn’t need!”

Praefectus Relay’s command post was little more than a partially refitted warehouse on the outskirts of Kaon. The post had been hastily assembled, intended to direct mundane data traffic necessary for the command and functioning of Lord Megatron’s rapidly growing military force. As such, the center had too few resources to handle an ever-increasing storm of data, of comm-relays and encrypted messages.

Soundwave’s little performance before the recruiters had been the most extensive use he’d yet made of his new abilities, the kind of test he could make nowhere else. Afterwards, however, he’d been ordered to report to his assigned duty station immediately. There had been no time to indulge in internal checks, not with so many optics on him -- no time to deal with either his exhaustion, or the subtle damage that might have been caused by his use of the telepathic module.

Soundwave had obeyed; he’d no other choice. Which left him here, shakily standing before a very irate praefectus. At least the news of Soundwave’s unprecedented skills hadn’t yet reached this little corner of the Lord High Protector’s army. It gave him a rare window of opportunity, a short period in which he was almost certain to be underestimated.

Soundwave distantly followed the progress of his eldest three symbionts, who had scattered to explore the hardware specifications of the facility, while he waited for the praefectus’ rant to grind to a halt. “Soundwave, acknowledges,” he said at last, at what appeared to be an appropriate point. He wondered what the praefectus had done to merit the apparent burden of overseeing Soundwave, but the answer wasn’t on the surface of Relay’s cortex, and he didn’t have the spare energy now to risk digging for it.

Relay scrubbed his faceplates. “Fine. Just... fine. Until I can get you replaced with useful mecha, you can take console three. Go complete as many training modules as you can until the shift ends. Primus.”

Console three was a jerry-rigged collection of cables and sockets, the linkages still bright with soldering. Soundwave logged in, set a tertiary thread to flicking through the training modules on offer, and idly slaved the a dozen unused terminals on this level to his. The installers of this hardware had relied rather extensively on security through obscurity. And since nothing a symbiont had seen before, no matter how fleeting the glance, could ever be obscure....

By the end of the duty shift, Soundwave had completed exactly half the training sets -- more would be suspicious -- had improved network efficiency by three percent simply by trimming dead node branches, and had infiltrated most of the low-level services this facility was tasked with running. And Laserbeak and Buzzsaw, squeezing themselves through tight spaces between walls and floors, had installed several uplink nodes that would facilitate even further access. Soundwave collected his generous allotment of energon from the dispensary in silence, ignoring the stares and grumbles around him, and retreated to his assigned quarters.

Perhaps as a joke, perhaps to nettle Relay, the Decepticons had taken Soundwave’s request in all seriousness. The small barracks was crowded with eight recharging platforms, bunked two tall. The platforms lacked the venting and heating elements of standard berths, but were equipped with power lines for forced rapid recharge.

Soundwave removed his bevy of cubes from subspace and set them on the single small shelf. And then, at long last, he allowed his kneejoints to fold, and sank down to sit on one of the platforms. And if another mech would say he collapsed, rather than sat... well, there were none here to observe him.

Soundwave waited.

Eventually, a grill clinked as it was neatly severed from its moorings and dragged back into a vent. Buzzsaw’s angular head emerged, peered around. Then both flightframes launched themselves, scattering to intently check over each wall.

Ravage, prowling silently under the bunked platforms -- even Soundwave had barely sensed him enter -- found the listening device. Quite crude, the thing was not much more than a microphone and transmitter, wired to a rather nice little transmission-cloaking modulator. The bladeframe brought it to Soundwave, who turned it over in his talons, considering.

 _//You must’ve really impressed them, Boss, if they already think we’re worth spying on,//_ Buzzsaw commented, landing on one pauldron to eye the little device with a critical optic. _//Though they’re obviously not putting much effort into it. Wonder if they do this to all the recruits?//_ The communication looked strange, as it always did. The thoughts gathered up in Buzzsaw’s processors first, running through filters and personality nodes that all shaped the appearance of the resultant glyphs, and then reached Soundwave’s bond-comms a split moment later. It was like hearing double, like an echo he couldn’t track down or turn off.

 _//Unlikely,//_ Laserbeak answered him, still inspecting the other vents and light-housings in the room. _//Can you imagine the sheer amount of null-data they’d have to filter through if they were spying on every single new recruit? They’re probably concentrating on mecha who might be problematic--recruits whose loyalties might be in doubt, for instance. Or particularly specialized or unusual frametypes.//_

 _//Should we destroy it, then? Show ‘em we’re not to be messed with?//_ Buzzsaw asked Soundwave.

The carrier formulated his reply, and it was perhaps a measure of his exhaustion that he neglected to actually comm back for a full nanoklik. He could see their thoughts, after all --- it seemed odd, for a moment, that they couldn’t sense his. Soundwave shook his helm. _//Negative. Their ignorance, better for our purposes. Soundwave: has alternative solution.//_

Unlimbering a secondary cable, he coiled it forward, unfurling the multi-tooled tip. Extending just a few slender cilia threads to infiltrate the tiny device, he absorbed the mechanism’s minimal programming. A tiny intercut, a quick insert of a couple spare lines of code, and he was done, withdrawing his cilia, leaving no evidence behind that the device had ever been tampered with. “Device, now under Soundwave’s control,” he said aloud. He gave it to Buzzsaw, who took it in his beak and went to re-attach it back in its original location. “Transmitter, now loops background noise whenever private conversation is desired.” Such as now.

Laserbeak and Ravage gave the final all clear, having inspected their new quarters to their satisfaction, and Soundwave inclined his helm in acknowledgement. “Flipsides, Ratbat, Rumble, Frenzy: eject,” he commanded, unlocking the armor over his docks, freeing the younger members of his cohort.

The three mechkin, plus a sleepy Ratbat, eagerly answered their carrier’s call. They too set about exploring the confines of their new home, with varying levels of enthusiasm or wary distrust, pinging back and forth the details of what they found. Ratbat found the energon first, and flitted around the cubes, uncoordinated with glee. Every last one of his threads were as pink as the energon as he calculated exactly how much fuel there was, which minerals it contained, how it had been distilled....

Flipsides, for his part, scrambled up onto the berth where Soundwave sat. He laid a small hand on his carrier’s armored leg, blue optics concerned. “Are you alright, Master? I could feel …” he stopped short, obviously unsure how to describe what he had sensed while docked. Soundwave … was more distant now, in a way that was hard to describe. Their carrier’s love, his fierce protectiveness and pride, was still there. But there was now something behind it; an almost echoing kind of stillness. As if their master was poised on the edge of a drop without end….

“Soundwave: merely low on charge,” the carrier explained, watching orange worry swirl in tight bands of anxiety through the little mech’s processors, streamers coiling loose, wreathing the little mech.

“I’ll bet,” Flipsides nodded, “running that, uh, device probably takes a lot of energy. Stent thought it might burn through a certain amount of free metal ions, as well, judging by the condition of... well, you know.” _-empty frame darkened chassis parametric fallen carrier-_

Soundwave acknowledged the statement. He noticed a thread of physical discomfort amongst all of Flipside’s other tangled code, and reached out to cup the mechkin’s helm, to stroke Flipsides’ cheek and neck plates. The little gears had gotten bound up uncomfortably behind a plate, and he carefully manipulated it with talon tips until the components shifted into proper position. “Soundwave: does not expect this post to last long. Cohort, soon to be assigned nearer to medical facilities.” Whether or not he could allow Flipsides to assist there was in considerably more doubt. Stent had ruled his medical bay with an iron fist, and would brook no threats or violence against his smallest assistant. Flipsides would lack such a patron here, and it was unlikely the Decepticon medics would welcome a mechkin’s interference in their domain.

“I was thinking about that,” Flipsides said, relaxing into the stroking. “It looked like you had a lot of training modules back there. And some empty terminals. Maybe I could learn something new. Transport piloting, or remote drone control, or something.” Neither were talents that symbionts typically acquired, save only in an academic sense. A symbiont could remember anything at all, but applying that knowledge along with good judgement took more calculating ability than most possessed. And Primus knew that drone control didn’t have much to do with Flipsides’s focii, the areas in which he’d specialized for so long.

But it would give Flipsides something to do, and keep him from wandering too far from his carrier’s protection. “Affirmative. Soundwave: will prepare terminal for Flipsides, next duty shift.”

“As long as it won’t be too much trouble,” murmured the mechkin, pressing himself closer. Warm gold was beginning to interrupt those swaths of orange, just a little.

“You should refuel, boss,” said Rumble, he and Frenzy each swiping a cube out from under Ratbat’s watchful little optics and bringing them over to Soundwave. Both of them still trailed code of fierce delight, just plainly and purely thrilled by the aft-kicking Soundwave had delivered earlier this orn. “You’re probably running low, especially after taking on four warframes like that. Which was slaggin’ awesome, by the way. Those fraggers never saw ya coming!”

Soundwave took the small cube from Rumble, sending an interlaced glyph of thanks. “Upgrade, proving highly effective,” he agreed. Their little band would not always have the advantage of surprise, however, and the module’s abilities were not without their weaknesses. Soundwave’s current condition was proof of that. Their cohort would need to rely also on older, better skills as well, brokering their talents and the information they gathered, all with an eye towards the future.

He stroked the talons of his free hand over Flipside’s plating, taking comfort in the nearness of his cohort as the mechkin pressed close to his side. It was … hard to think. He needed to plan, to strategize … but his own exhaustion dragged at him, underlaid by the constant tugging undertow of the module’s telepathic pull. The thought occurred to Soundwave that he should probably shut the module down, conserve the power it drew... but the device had not disobeyed him since before the fight. If he muffled it now....

Laserbeak launched himself off one wall, gliding to his favorite shoulder-perch and twining his tail about Soundwave’s arm. He pressed the side of his beak to Soundwave’s audial, and the carrier could see the subtle threads of concern/care woven through the elegant rising glyphs of a flightframe’s functioning. “You should rest, Master. We will need to be ready for the next duty-shift. May …” Laserbeak hesitated. He’d obviously learned from Ravage what had happened the last time the symbiont had attempted to offer his spark-memories as solace. “May we share a memory with you?”

Soundwave reached up to stroke and scritch along Laserbeak’s sinuous neck, watching enjoyment bloom across his symbiont’s coding. “Affirmative,” he said. _//Soundwave, also wishes to perform an error-check.//_

The flightframe chirred his agreement, but Soundwave could see Laserbeak’s concern sharpen. Over the several orn in which Soundwave had recovered in the arena, he’d done a thorough comparison and check of his systems twice, comparing his core operational code against the copies he’d downloaded to Laserbeak and Ravage. Each time, he’d come up with a handful of errors that self-repair had neither detected nor addressed -- snippets of strange coding drawn from other frametypes, tiny deletions where the telepathic module had simply pulled a line or two into itself. None of them, individually, were of any great concern. Even simple mecha had billions of subroutines -- codeglitches sometimes just happened.

But normally, a healthy and well-maintained mech might suffer a single such error in a megavorn. One or two an orn... was a stunningly high rate of error, of mutation.

“Of course, my Master. Mayhaps an old favorite?” Laserbeak murmured, gently pressing the top of his head against Soundwave’s audial, tail coiling a little tighter. His chestplates slotted neatly back, baring the port there for one of Soundwave’s primaries.

Flipsides wriggled happily. “Hey you guys. Have you seen this one yet? With Tidepull’s symphony....” both other mechkin folded their faceplates into unhappy frowns, “...and the assassins and the drakisframe?"

“Assassins! A drakisframe!” Rumble and Frenzy were already climbing eagerly up onto the narrow berth, Frenzy adroitly swapping Soundwave’s empty cube of fuel for a full one. “A drakisframe! Drink up, Boss! This is gonna be awesome! So cool!”

Soundwave mouthparts curved up at the corners, just a little. “Affirmative. Memory, exceedingly cool.” He swallowed the rest of the low-grade energon, for once grateful for the stuff’s edge of bitter iron, and the bite of a little too much added sulphur. If Stent was correct in his speculations, the additional minerals in wargrade fuel might be vital. Might be. There was so much he simply did not know....

Soundwave set the dregs of the second cube -- a mouthful of gritty half-processed energon slurry -- beside the berth, and unlimbered a few more cables as he settled himself back. Ratbat managed to tear himself away from the energon and flitted over, happily wedging himself between Soundwave’s lower jawstruts and his chestplate. The tiny symbiont was all but burbling over the data he’d found, and Soundwave accepted the glideframe’s datafile graciously, running it through a few high-level transformations before returning it for the glideframe to admire.

Ravage and Buzzsaw glanced between one another, and Soundwave watched their intention flower, take shape. _//Excursions, not advised,//_ he warned, weaving in his own modifiers of concern and caution, as well as gratitude.

Ravage bowed his head. _//We will not go far, Master. Just enough to keep watch, here and in the corridor.//_

 _//Affirmative,//_ Soundwave returned, settling himself down onto his back. There was precious little space for a large mech and five wriggly symbionts, but they soon all found comfortable spots draped over and around him, linked together by their carrier’s information highway. Soundwave paused a moment to assign resident subroutines the task of running the code comparison to check himself against his stored copy, and then signaled the platform to link up and begin feeding its trickle current into his capacitors.

And then, secure in the guardianship of his symbionts, Laserbeak’s data flowing over his cables, Soundwave shut down higher processing and entered recharge.

 

\-----

 

The music halls of Tarn were one of the wonders of the ancient world, a testament to Cybertronian civilization, and the blossoming of what some mecha were already speaking of as the Prime’s Great Age. The vast, interlinked structures had been destroyed uncounted times, but always, always had risen from their own ashes, each time larger and more elaborately beautiful than before.

Built on a bed of silver so deep and pure that the metal itself seemed to sing, as if it captured music in the very bonds between atoms, the concert complex towered over every other structure in this hemisphere. Some of the amphitheatres opened to the sky, while others were covered only in domes of delicate crystal that refracted the warm glow of an orange sun, or the points of a billion stars. Others were smaller, secretive hollows, sheathed in textured plates of uranium, aluminum, gold, or a hundred different alloys. A few were clad in imported calcite-dense bone from the megalith herds of Termis 3, which resonated with its own uniquely organic frequencies, adding alien harmonies to Cybertronian compositions. Students from across the planet studied their art here; every maestro, every songsmith all yearned to perform in the symphonic halls. The very air seemed resonant with acoustic potential, with arias and a million scraps of unfinished songs.

Now, however, the air resonated with a different song. Excitement fluttered through comm-calls, the atmosphere laden with flickers of dissonance and harmony as a thousand trouveurs practiced their songs, tuned instruments and vocalizers, and shaved micron-thin wafers from the edges of projective arrays to project their truest, best sound.

For Tidepull had come to Tarn.

Still young--barely twenty vorn old--Tidepull was already reknowned across Cybertron as a maestro like no other. True maestri were rare; few creators and even fewer city-states had the resources to enspark a frameclass devoted exclusively to music. To be created, down to the smallest strut, to be living artists of sound. A maestro’s audials were more finely tuned than any other, able to distinguish frequencies and waveforms far beyond the ability of most mecha. Their vocalizers were superbly crafted, powerful and delicately modulated; their compositions were of surpassing complexity and spark-wrenching loveliness. A maestro was built for music, every plate on their frame perfectly tuned to bell-like perfection, their very fields resonating in choral harmonies.

Even in that rarefied company, however, Tidepull stood helm and shoulders above all others. His youth alone set him apart -- he’d been fully framed only for a handful of vorn. But it was his incomparable skill that had already attracted a host of admirers, would-be patrons and cohort mates of every sort, from Tower Iacon down to the smallest cadre of local gentry.

But Tidepull’s rising star had attracted less savory attention, as well. Mecha fought over him, Towers rattled their sabers, the obsessed tracked his every movement. All of Cybertron waited impatiently for every new composition, for the barest scraps of discarded song from the young genius. Laserbeak knew of no less than five different Chronicler-cohorts that had taken it upon themselves to document every public performance--and more than a few of the private ones--that the young maestro undertook. A few symbionts had not stopped there either, committing every moment they could of the maestro’s life to spark-memory, as if Tidepull were a Prime or Lord Protector.

Laserbeak didn’t count himself among the numbers of those so obsessed, though he was aware that the distinction could be considered a fine one. Or even a selfish one, in a way, in that Laserbeak cared less about the maestro than he did about Tidepull’s music. That glorious, soaring, sparkbreaking music that shivered down his struts, caressed flightplates …. The music was what had brought him to Tarn, and the chance to listen to it for himself, to engrave that ephemeral performance upon his very spark and hold it tight.

His carrier had not been difficult to convince; in truth, Impedance himself was a fan of Tidepull’s work. His master had made a few token arguments, pointing out that Tidepull’s career was already well-watched by other cohorts, that Laserbeak might be better served in discovering other, more unknown treasures to covet. None of it had made so much as a dent in Laserbeak’s determination, however. In the end, Impedance had caved to his cohort’s pleas, and had agreed they could go.

Wings closely folded, the symbiont paused at a juncture in the ventilation shafts, and turned right, antigravs just active enough to keep his steps as light as possible in the darkness. He stopped to peer with beady optic between the bars of a grill, so old and corroded there didn’t seem to be any way to open it. From the angle of the lights, though, he wasn’t at the apex over the stage quite yet. Laserbeak went on. He wanted to be as close to that wondrous music as possible, wanted to be able to soak in it until it resonated with his very spark.

He continued on, talons placed with exacting precision, head and tail held low, careful not to let either scrape against the sides of the shaft. He snaked his head around another corner, pausing, trying to gauge his location. According to the plans he’d seen, the ventilation shaft he was in slanted up and towards the back of the multi-levelled stage. Which would put him to the rear of the space in which the trouveurs and Tidepull would perform. There should be a smaller branching just ahead, however, that followed the arch of the cantilevered dome upwards, reaching its apex just forward of the stage.

*That* was the spot Laserbeak wanted.

He danced a little in delight as he found the branching shaft, less than a mechanometer further up. He was so close! He continued climbing, shivering in anticipation. To finally be able to hear Tidepull with his own audials, so close that he would almost be part of the performance--! The incline had become more steep, forcing him to scrabble for footing. One pede slipped, talons scraping loudly against metal, and Laserbeak froze. Had the sound given him away? Through some trick of the hall’s acoustics, he could hear voices. The security mecha assigned to this performance were already on high alert, and if he got caught….

But the voices grew no louder. For all its hushed tones, though, the distant conversation seemed urgent, the words clipped. Laserbeak tilted his head, upping the gain on his audials. Backstage whispers and low-level comm-chatter during a performance were not uncommon. Whispers *before* a performance, after the sets had already been laid and everything arranged … those were a bit more unusual.

_“ … bargain … came to us.”_

_“Price … rejection. --eryllium Tower … to overlook … -sult.”_

_“--aestro. … an example?”_

Sensory spines flared, a shiver of intermingled curiosity and foreboding shivering down his backstruts. Tarn’s music halls had many secrets, Laserbeak knew. It seemed he had found another one. He hesitated briefly, looking longingly upwards at his intended perch. But the allure of forbidden knowledge was too much to resist.

Lithe as a turbofox and perhaps even more slender, Laserbeak twisted himself into a right, round section of air duct. He could hardly crawl in the space, breastplates touching the dusty floor, wings rubbing against the sides. A few lengths at a time, Laserbeak made his way to a vent behind the stage. His beak made short work of the screws that held an old grill in place, snipping them off neatly. He caught the terminal square of metal between his jaws before it could tumble down, and betray his presence. One last twist through the ragged-edged gap, and he spread his wings at last, nanites darkened nearly to black.

Laserbeak twisted midair, flapped once, and found a hidden place on a high catwalk, twisting his tail tight around the handrail support. He’d been exposed in the air for only a nanosecond, but he froze nevertheless, not even venting from his exertion, trying to tell if he’d been seen.

A few tools clinked below, the shadowy sounds of mecha acting in secret. More words drifted up to him, clearer now. “What degree you want the placement? No, a little more... there. Check the autoviewfinder.”

Laserbeak placed the vent grill carefully down, not letting it so much as scrape the dusty walkway. Something was going on. A surprise for the performance? Did they intend for pyrotechnics, or some manner of lightshow to accompany the music? A disappointment, if so -- many mecha enjoyed such showy special effects, but Tidepull’s music needed no such tawdry accompaniments.

But even if that were the case ... why would the installation be so clandestine? And only a joor before the performance? Laserbeak considered contacting his carrier -- Impedance would be able to calculate the most likely reason for this odd behavior in a sparkbeat. But even the mostly tightly-banded comm transmission risked detection. His wings flicked once in indecision.

Then he slipped between the bars of the catwalk, dropping into a shallow, fast glide, wings half-furled, flightplates split as far as they would transform for feather-muffled silence.

It took only moments to find a better vantage, deep among the hanging cables and other equipment that cluttered the back of the stage. There were two mecha, he could see now -- smallish grounders, both of them, in the dark mottled black and navy of stagehands.

But stagehands, Laserbeak was certain, did not typically carry sidearms.

Both mecha were hunched over a tangle of wiring, just behind the place a singer might stand. The heat of a small welder flashed from time to time, cutting, reattaching. One of them stood, backed up a little, while the other jacked into whatever they’d installed and measured the readings. Laserbeak could make out their quiet whispers. “Move right, make sure we got good tracking on this thing. Yeah, now left.... Good. Now the transmission keys.... Fine, just be careful with those.”

The moving mech looked up nervously, hurried back to his fellow malfeasor. Laserbeak’s sharp optics scanned the upper part of the backstage, comparing what he could see -- mechanometer by mechanometer -- with everything he could remember of this hall, and others like it. He’d never been backstage here, but he’d certainly seen other stage equipment. And...

Those mobile light fixtures. Tethered now, they were meant to move on their own ponderous suite of antigravs. They were large devices, to be sure. But they’d never seemed quite so bulky before … what was different? Checking his memory-files, Laserbeak was certain that the fixtures were normally more oblong, less bottom-heavy. A new design? Blessed with a flightframe’s keen optics, Laserbeak shifted, magnifying, narrowing his focus.

Tight-wrapped bundles had been attached. Bundles of wrapped, intricately woven wire around a solid core of some kind--and very much like the ones now being stuffed into the opened gap beneath the stage, in with all the rewired stage parts.

Laserbeak froze. Were they hiding something? Or... planting it? Hiding credits, or precious imports, or perhaps even recording devices? But why so many? Flaring his plating to break up his silhouette, he crept closer, peering down at the exposed tangle of cabling and esoteric mechanisms. Stage engineering had never been one of his foci, however …. he had watched the setup, once, of a team of artist-mecha that specialized in pyrotechnical performances. And that wiring … much of that wiring was identical to what they had used. Wrapped in highly combustible silicate sheathing, the wiring was designed to amplify and channel an electric charge into an ignition trigger. And if overloaded with too much charge--then the wiring itself would burn, fast and hot. The artists had used it to set up timed secondary explosions, great blossoms of plasmic fireflowers and firefalls that lit the sky with incandescent and destructive beauty.

The performance Laserbeak had watched had been amazing … a dizzying display of artistry and technical skill. But there, every precaution had been taken, the performance itself designed to be viewed from a safe distance. If such explosions happened here, where the very stage itself was designed to amplify and reflect soundwaves and would do the same for far more dangerous forces … Laserbeak stifled a dismayed keen at the thought. Hundreds of mecha would be damaged. And those on the stage itself, the maestro who stood exposed in front of all of them … they might very well be extinguished!

Whatever these mecha were planning, it had to be stopped. But how? Impedance would believe him, would know what to do--but the performance was soon to begin. His carrier was only middling in rank, with few contacts in Tarn--what if Impedence couldn’t convince the authorities to stop the performance? Tidepull, and his music, and so many others--they would all be lost forever!

The mecha were finishing up now, sealing away their devices beneath the stage panelling. Laserbeak had to fight the urge to jitter in adrenalized fear as he saw his opportunity slipping away. Should he attack them? Should he try to slip inside, and disable the devices? What to do what to do what to do--

\--wait. There, behind them. Only a flightframe would have spotted it--the barest flicker of movement. A darker shadow among shadows. What was that? Another member of the plot?

He had to know the full measure of what he was facing, no matter how horrible. Quick as thought, Laserbeak darted forward, between twisted cables, body flashing between the backstage equipment. The shadow seemed to vanish, and Laserbeak hesitated, optics spiraled wide for any hint of light. Big mecha could switch between spectrums with ease, but the technology wasn’t yet miniaturized enough for a symbiont, and if he could only--

\--*there.* An opened hatch, an access route under the stage. He darted for it in a moment while both the saboteurs’ backs were turned, gliding soundlessly down into a forest of cables. There was hardly room for a small mech to squeeze himself into the space, and Laserbeak had to do more hopping than gliding, helm swivelling as he searched for the mech who just *had* to be down here.

There was no warning at all. One moment he was flitting through the darkness, the next, pinned to the ground under a heavy pede. His vocalizer squawked as air hissed from his compressed vents, his plating scraped the ground as Laserbeak thrashed, trying to throw off his attacker, to bring his little laser to bear....

“ _Be still!_ ” a deep voice snarled in his audial, a bare whisper for all the command behind it.

“Did you hear something?” The query came from the top of the understage hatch. Laserbeak froze. Heavy pedes scraped up there, a saboteur checking the shadows, searching for the source of the noise.

Very, very quietly, Laserbeak twisted his head around on slender neck. And found himself faceplates to faceplates with a furious bladeframe... and every last one of that bladeframe’s fearsome teeth.

Oh scrap.

The shuffling and scraping got closer, faded a bit. The saboteur passed so close that Laserbeak could feel the vibrations of his steps in the silver under his chest.

“....can’t tell. Sounded like a boltbat. Yeah, that’s the last of it. ...and now? ...the frag outta here....” the voices up above faded. There was a little more scuffling, then the sound of two mecha moving. Something heavy clanked.

“Are you part of this travesty?” Laserbeak hissed, as quietly as he was able.

The bladeframe fixed him with a baleful optic.

“If I were, do you think I’d be hiding here? From the likes of them?” Even hushed to the barest whisper of sound, the low growl of the bladeframe’s voice was heavy with disdain.

“But--then--what are you doing here?” Laserbeak floundered, squirming, trying to free himself, only to stop with a squeak as that taloned pede pressed down on his chassis.

“The same as you. Only far more effectively. Be *silent*.”

“But--” A low rumble silenced his protests, the bladeframe tensed above him, audials and sensory spines hackled upwards, listening intently. Laserbeak tried to imitate his captor, listening as well as he was able, even though he knew he could not hope to match a bladeframe’s auditory range.

The scrape of pedes against the decking had faded, receding into the distance. After a few endless moments more, the bladeframe relaxed, sensory spines sleeking back down against his plating. Scarlet optics turned, glaring down at the pinned flightframe once more.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Laserbeak tried to flare his plating in indignation--then, taking in those teeth, thought the better of it. “That was my question! What are you doing here? What’s going on? Are those mecha really trying to kill Tidepull? Why? Why would anyone want to do that?”

The bladeframe growled, though this time there seemed to be more exasperation in it than anger. He stepped backwards, lifting his weight from Laserbeak’s chassis. “Vector Sigma. How old are you?” His tail lashed once, cutting through the air with exacting precision, even in the confined space. “Primus save me from bumbling sparklings.”

“I am not!” Laserbeak said indignantly. “My name is Laserbeak, and my carrier is Impedence and I’m not going to let anyone kill Tidepull. Not until I get to listen to his music!”

“Quiet.” Laserbeak snapped his beak shut with a squawk as the bladeframe shouldered forward, crowding the smaller flightframe into a corner. “They may have retreated, but sound echoes. I’ve already cut the wiring to the triggers on the explosives, but I cannot afford to give these assassins any opportunity to attempt an alternate plan.” The bladeframe’s head lifted. “And you. You are spoiling my hunt. Do you understand?”

“Wh-what … do you want me to do?” Laserbeak asked, suddenly uncertain.

“Stay here. Flit about, squawk an alarm. Alert the authorities; I care not.”

“But what will you be doing?”

The bladeframe paused, paw lifted midstep. “Hunting down the assassins.” And then the big symbiont was just... gone, the tip of his tail vanishing into the narrow crevasse.

Laserbeak clamped down on a keen before it could escape. Even without the triggers, something could set the explosives off. His wings trembled -- he could dart to the mecha just beginning to take their seats! But... would any but his carrier believe him?

The bladeframe meant to stop the malefactors before they could discover that their plan had failed, and lay a new one. But a single symbiont couldn’t deactivate two full-sized mecha! Two was hardly any better, but Laserbeak had been practicing with his onboard weaponry for vorn, and --

\-- hardly knowing what he was doing, the flightframe darted down into the pitch darkness, and nearly collided with the bladeframe’s hindquarters. He barely managed to stifle an undignified squeak, talons scrabbling as he backpedaled.

“What--I told you to stay!” the bladeframe snarled, turning on him. Laserbeak lifted his head, trying to look resolute, even as he tucked wings in tight against his chassis to hide his nervousness.

“You can’t take them on by yourself, and there’s no one I could comm that would get here in time. So I’m going to help you.”

“You--did your creator install your helm on backwards? I don’t need your help,” the other symbiont snapped.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Laserbeak looked off into the distance, giving an artful shrug. “But I’m going anyway. Unless you want to waste more time standing here arguing about it …?”

The bladeframe’s aggravated growl resonated along his struts, and Laserbeak shivered under the palpable threat of the much larger symbiont. There was a long, considering moment. Then those teeth snapped shut, the bladeframe’s _annoyance/frustration/resignation_ prickling against Laserbeak’s plating. “Fine. But you’d better keep up. And if you get caught--”

“I won’t,” Laserbeak hastened to reassure him.

“IF you get caught, I’m not going to save your aft.”

“I understand.” Laserbeak jittered impatiently, shifting from pede to pede. “Can we go now?

“Primus.” But the bladeframe turned away, and headed downwards into the darkness once more, Laserbeak following faithfully behind.


	5. Chapter 5

The deep bed of silver beneath the music halls of Tarn was riddled with tunnels.

Some were recent, carved in the past handful of megavorn, strung thick with cabling or choked with abandoned debris of construction. Others ... were far older. Several times, the bladeframe padded through layers of ruins, the rubble of music halls now long forgotten by mecha. Tiny autophage drones scuttled in these places, busily sealing off passages or opening others. But all the hallways, whether large or small, echoed sound. Snatches of song hummed in places -- reflections of the ongoing performances above, perhaps, or ghosts of refrains long past. Voices murmured, always just a little too distant to distinguish, no matter how Laserbeak upped the gain on his audials.

It was eerie -- disorienting, in a way. A breath of sound might be the movement of a nearby creature... or might simply be the swish of air under Laserbeak’s wings. The chime of a falling chunk of silver might be caused by a misplaced pede, or the still-echoing reverberations of a collapse from long ago. There was no way to be certain.

The two symbionts were far from the only life here. Pools of mercury or francium or tetraamminelithium gathered themselves in depressions where the metals seeped from the silver walls, still as mirrors, or crossed by the faint ripples of things moving beneath. Crystal growths of energon illuminated the older corridors in irregularly-spaced clumps of pinkish light, the mineralized energy growing slowly but steadily from the body of Primus. Creatures fed upon these upwellings of energy -- boltbats, glitch mice, retrorats, and more. These in turn were prey for other creatures: Laserbeak winged neatly over an ant-droid nest, dodging with agile skill the silvery sand flicked at him by the buried predators. Such gambits might suffice to knock a boltbat to the ground, but a flightframe was not so easily ensnared!

There was evidence of the passage of bigger things as well. In one region, perfect circular holes had simply been cut away underfoot, deep vertical vents or shafts several mechanometers wide and extending farther than even Laserbeak could see -- abyss below, darkness above.

Gaps between a series of once-spectacular arches -- now crumbled and corroded -- led the two symbionts to wider corridor, and a line of tracks through powdery dust. Laserbeak watched with wide optics as the bladeframe dipped his head to the pedeprints, sensory spines pricked forward as he inspected them minutely.

He turned left, and Laserbeak followed, suddenly not sure if he’d be able to find his way back to the surface at all, let alone....

...voices filtered up, distorted, and hardly more distinct than the background murmur. “?...far enough far enough? --eah ah ah. Now we wait wait ait t.....”

 _//I hear them!//_ Laserbeak carefully pared down a comm transmission, so that it would only reach a mechanometer or two, and sent to the bladeframe. His trepidation had been washed away by his excitement. They hadn’t lost their quarry after all--they must be close! He tilted his head, trying to orient on the sounds. But that task was far easier said than done; the faint echoes had reverberated off so many walls, been distorted, its source disguised by the labyrinth of tunnels and cavities in this place, and the silver that absorbed echoes and emitted the vibrations and transmitted them to places unknown. He swooped to a nearby outcrop, latching on with wings half-furled, peering down the nearest dark crevice, confused by the fading echoes. _//This way?//_

 _//Not unless you want to wedge yourself into a crack you’ll never get out of,//_ came the sardonic reply. _//This way.//_ The bladeframe prowled off down a twisting side passage adorned with primitive glyph-shapes, worn by the passage of time into near invisibility.

 _//Okay!//_ His creator had always told him it was important to learn from those who knew their function well, and it was obvious the bladeframe was well-versed in hunting mecha. Laserbeak couldn’t help but wonder how long he’d been doing it--and why the bladeframe had chosen to involve himself, especially with his carrier nowhere in sight. Did he even have a templar? Were there cohort-brothers above, waiting for the bladeframe to return? Just like Laserbeak’s were surely waiting for him? They’d be worried by now....

The big bladeframe was intent upon his hunt, however, and Laserbeak was forced to put his questions aside in favor of navigating his way through the darkness, following the other symbiont’s lead. The dim reddish light was enough to see by, but only just, and more than once Laserbeak avoided an embarrassing collision by a talon’s-width as an unexpected wall or buckled bit of metal suddenly emerged from the shadows in front of him. The darkness, however, hampered the bladeframe not at all. He seemed part of the tunnels themselves, a ripple of silver and ebony-plated shadow, perfectly camouflaged against the tarnished walls, taloned pedes silent against the buckled, uneven ground. He led the way, pausing only to better gauge the trail he followed … and as they went deeper, the echoes returned, faded--then words emerged from an dark opening up ahead with startling clarity.

“You’re sure we got enough metal between us n’ the stage to baffle the blast? If you’re wrong, we’re gonna be picking shrapnel out of our frames for the next decaorn.”

“Don’t worry. We’re perfectly safe down here. This deep, the whole soundhall could come down and all it’d do is shake loose a little metaldust.”

“--but the signal’s still gonna get through?”

“Yeah, I planted a few repeaters, just to be safe. Payout on this job’s too good to frag it up by being sloppy.”

“I hear that ….”

The bladeframe had paused, jaws parting in a razored and silent snarl. Then he loped forward, leaping silently from fallen pillar to outcrop to broken wall, prowling forward, bladed armor sleeked and tight against his frame. Above, Laserbeak did his best to imitate the older symbiont, darkening his nanites, splitting flightplates to glide as silently as possible. The darkness of the tunnel mouth opened into an ancient vaulted chamber, with the two assassins on the far side, conferring over their equipment. Part of the chamber was collapsed now, but the very far end was still largely intact. Huge stairs, deeply grooved by some dragging force, led down into another subterranean pool.

 _//They don’t even know we’re here--should we attack them now? We can take them by surprise!//_ The mecha could turn around at any time, but if Laserbeak attacked from above, he could hit them with his lasers, and then the bladeframe could--

 _//No. Not yet. It’s too open.//_ The bladeframe’s glyphs were terse and authoritative. Laserbeak couldn’t quite hide his disappointment, but obediently stayed where he was. _//We need to tilt the odds more in our favor,//_ the other symbiont continued. _//Wait here.//_

 _//Uhm. Okay.//_ Laserbeak hunched himself down, wings tucked tight, careful not to let himself present a silhouette. _//What are you--//_ but the bladeframe was gone. Just gone, and Laserbeak froze, flightplates trembling.

A hush went through the metal around him, a quiet kind of listening. And then a single note, filtered and echoed and amplified by a billion years of carved and crafted tunnels, began to sound. So quietly at first, it could have been nothing more than a fabrication of this deep bed of silver, a remnant of a long distant past... but it built, it expanded, decibel by decibel, so sweet it made Laserbeak’s very spark spin faster.

“That him?” said one of the assassins. “Yeah,” said the other, and leaned down to his cube of equipment.

Something snarled behind him. Deep, powerful, big as a nosoron, something vicious and hungry.

With a high shriek of alarm, Laserbeak launched himself straight up, wings beating with all his strength. The two assassins jerked. “Oh frag!” One of them hit the ignition on the device as both of them scrambled back. “You said this was safe!”

“From the bomb you fragger, not -- get back to where it narrows!”

Wriggling frantically, Laserbeak wedged himself into a chink in the old ceiling, peering down over his shoulder at the darkness below. The assassins had their handguns unholstered, pointing them unsteadily at the darkness, though evidently they couldn’t find the source of the sound any better than could Laserbeak. They came to a halt at the top of the ancient stairs, protected by the chokepoint of fallen debris, their backs to the lapping pool of mercury.

And then the bladeframe padded out into the light of a cluster of energon crystals.

One of the assassins barked a sharp laugh and started forward, pistol raised. “Frag me, it’s just a turbopus--”

Behind them, the pool exploded.

The thing that heaved itself up, coagulated mercury flowing down from its heavy-plated sides, was bigger than most mecha, with row upon row of jagged teeth as long as a mech’s arm. Six tiny optics studded its crudely-plated bronze helm; each blunt and stubby pede was powerfully clawed. Bigger than even a large mech, the biggest alloygator that Laserbeak had ever seen, the creature lunged with an ambusher’s inherent speed. The sheer weight of the thing bore one of the assassins to the ground, even as jaws like an oxide shark’s closed around the other’s outflung arm.

Screaming and gunfire overtook the rising music. The cavern exploded into cacophonous fury, the screams of the mecha on the ground interspersed with the shriek of tearing metal, the stutter of cannon-fire. The assassin-mecha’s sidearms were of little use against an alloygator’s heavy-plated hide, even at close range, the frantic shots richocheting madly from armor and walls alike. Laserbeak dodged another stray bullet, frantically weaving and circling, trying to get a clear lock on the creature. _//What is--how did--did you do this?? They hit the switch, they hit it and I don’t know if a signal got through and slag! Oh Primus on a slagging silicon chip--!//_

The alloygator had released the second mech’s arm, turning its attention to the first. Still trapped by the massive creature’s weight, the mech was screaming in incoherent fear, firing frantically into the thing’s thorax. Jaws opened, impossibly wide--then severed the mech’s helm with a savage *crunch*. Cabling sparked, leaking as it was ripped free with a shake of the gator’s head. Two more crunches, and the helm was just *gone*, tossed down that great gullet to be cannibalized for tiny parts and gears and energon. Laserbeak had heard stories of the great metal-eating predators that lurked in the shadowed depths below … but he’d never thought to see one this close!

 _//I didn’t--didn’t think it was so large. Don’t get close enough for it to grab you!//_ The bladeframe was darting from side to side, sideguns firing, but keeping his distance. There was no way, however, for either of them to get to the equipment that wouldn’t also lead them into the monster’s teeth. _//No sound of explosions--my sabotage worked. Now we just--//_

The alloygator’s prey was still fighting, firing spasmodically, but hampered by the loss of his helm and the sensory and processing cores within, the assassin-mech’s efforts were ineffective at best. Another limb spat sparks as it was wrenched free, armor tearing like metalmesh under those great jaws. That proved to be too much for the second mech. Staggering to his pedes, a partially-severed arm dangling limply, he turned and ran, leaving his companion behind as he fled blindly into the darkness.

_//Slag--after him! We cannot let him get away!//_

Laserbeak twisted on a wingtip, diving after the mech even as his tactical processors rerouted, confused but obedient. _//But what about--!//_

 _//Leave him! He’s as good as deactivated already,//_ the bladeframe said, the glyphs resonating with fatalistic acceptance. _//The alloygator will be done with him soon enough, and then it’ll come after us. Move!//_

With a short sharp squawk, Laserbeak kicked off against the top of a shattered pillar and arrowed after the running assassin. He wheeled too tightly, lost a little elevation -- and something about the quality of the crunching sounds of snapping metal made him glance back.

The bladeframe had gone after the assassin’s dropped trigger control. And the alloygator had noticed.

Flightplates straining, Laserbeak threw himself into a hairpin turn, fighting for balance, for speed, wings beating so hard the metal of them bowed. Time seemed to slow, he could see the pink gleam of terrible jagged teeth, each droplet of spilled energon, illuminated by the cascade of sparks from the broken chassis of the decapitated assassin.

He hit the alloygator’s head just as its jaws closed down on the bladeframe’s back.

Scrabbling, Laserbeak clawed at the alloygator directly between its optical ridges. Wings beating madly, he bit at the thing’s huge head, fired wildly at the monster’s optics, its joints, his small laser cutting smoking lines in the thick bronze plating.

The alloygator hardly seemed to notice. Its teeth sheared down; it reared back, plucking the struggling bladeframe off the ground like he was no more than a sparkling. Something popped and flared, a terrible, grotesque sound -- one of the alloygator’s pedes had crushed the prone assassin’s spark chamber, just like that. And then the beast thrashed its head, shaking its prey.

Hanging on to that mercury-slicked helm was impossible, despite his best efforts. Whiplashed away by the alloygator’s savage movements, Laserbeak tumbled, hit sharp metal. Pedes scrabbling, he managed to clamp his beak down, holding desperately on to a protruding plate on the bladeframe’s leg. The alloygator had the dark symbiont by one of his sideguns, those massive teeth sunk entirely through the weapon. The sheer force of the of acceleration was monstrous; he could feel his grip slipping, knew the roaring bladeframe would be shaken apart with the next whiplash twist …..

At the apex of another heavy-helmed swing, Laserbeak twisted impossibly, hooked a talon under the bladeframe’s half-crushed weapons mount, and triggered the damaged emergency releases.

Both symbionts were thrown free, tumbling helplessly over the rubble and debris. The alloygator devoured the heavy gatling guns in two great gulps -- ammunition, barrels, and everything -- and heaved itself ponderously forward.

Laserbeak keened as he staggered to his pedes -- one was twisted, the strut wrenched or maybe broken -- and fought to regain the air. _//Whose helm was installed backward, exactly? What were you thinking?!//_

The bladefame lunged, launching Laserbeak higher into the air with the flat of his head, and ran beneath. Even stripped of his sideguns, he was still a big symbiont, but swift for all his size. _//Just go!//_

The battered symbionts fled; and around them, choral strains of music resonated through the tunnels, sweet and pure and true, simple melodies twining, rising over the hiss of the massive, laboring vents above them.

Caverns and tunnels flashed by -- where was the one they had come from? Both symbionts were leaking fuel, and while it wasn’t any great amount, Laserbeak knew all too well that they were leaving a trail a blind mech could follow. Had they passed this patch of crystals before? That pool of molten sulphur? There--oil and lubricants smeared one stone wall -- this was the same way the other assassin had fled. But Laserbeak had no time to examine it, for other sounds had joined the music: the steady beat of clawed pedes, the hissing scrape of a long, powerful body dragged over rubble.

They turned, following the trail the fleeing mecha had left behind. _//It’s gaining on us!//_ Laserbeak commed frantically, no longer caring who else might hear. _//I can hear it, it’s getting closer, what if--//_

 _//Don’t panic,//_ the bladeframe snapped. _//I know these tunnels, there’s a--//_ Talons scraped against the ground as he lunged around another blind corner, running full tilt, Laserbeak not even a winglength behind … and then the space opened up before them, the tunnel walls expanding outward into a vast, shining cavern. Tidepull’s symphony soared all around them, amplified and echoing, every note achingly pure, the very walls singing in response to the maestro’s voice.

In the center of that cavern was their target: a single, staggering assassin-mech.

 _//There!//_ Laserbeak sent with vicious glee. _//I’ll get him!//_ He dived forward, intent on his prey.

 _//Laserbeak, wai--!//_ Almost before he realized it, the alloygator was on them, its heavy-armored frame hissing across the silvered floor of the cavern with uncanny speed. Jaws snapped upwards, slicing through the air, and Laserbeak threw himself to one side, twisting out of his dive, frantically backwinging. He fired down at the beast’s head, but his little lasers had no effect … and now the alloygator had spotted the bladeframe, and the wounded mech beyond. Small optics pinned, focussing, that blunt, unlovely head swinging in a moment of indecision.

“Run!” Laserbeak called out, the cavern echoing his cry. As if in counterpoint, Tidepull’s music faded, became darker, heavy beats thrumming through the walls and the floor, a complicated syncopation that throbbed and called.

The alloygator chose its target. It growled, a rending, tearing sound as it reared upwards, optics focussed on the retreating bladeframe before it. Over that roar was another sound: Tidepull’s voice, a pure choral melody rising in triumph, like a clarion bugle-call through the darkness--

\--and the thundering roar of a drakisframe answered that call.

Buffeted by sound and his own panic, Laserbeak twisted in the air, frantically trying to find the source of the noise as the cavern walls shook, metaldust falling from above. _//Wh--what’s going on? What is that? Impedence! Master, I need--!//_ The quaking of the metal around them increased, a section of the ceiling falling inward with a crash. More metal fell, dust fogging the air. Then … the floor began changing. Began *glowing*, with the acrid tang of melting silver, sagging downwards. Through the fogged air, Laserbeak could just barely see the other symbiont, the big bladeframe backing away from the center of the cavern, close to the far wall. The cavern floor dipped, glowing molten-red.

Then, with a great gout of fire, it exploded upwards.

The creature that clawed its way up through that inferno was like nothing Laserbeak had ever seen. A hundred times larger than any warframe, it made the lethal bulk of the alloygator look like a new hatched sparkling. Talons longer than the gator’s entire body pulled a sleek, scarlet-and-silver armored frame from the opening, a helm rising upwards, jaws agape and glowing with the heat of an internal furnace. Daggered spines clattered, hackling up from the long line of that neck, along a massive-plated spine that seemed to have no end. The drakisframe’s bulk rose from the darkness, yellow optics blazing … and Laserbeak found himself pinned under the gaze of a single great optic almost as large as his entire body.

Laserbeak fled.

A wave of superheated air buoyed him, the sheer force of it rebounding him against the ceiling as the scarlet-plated drakisframe clawed another shining coil of its body from the abyss, drew a breath, and unleashed another massive gout of flame. Molten silver rained down, droplets spattering everywhere, mech-sized chunks tumbling down in an avalanche as the drakis climbed upward. The layers of metal between caverns parted like foil in the face of the creature’s strength.

Speed was the symbiont’s only ally against such destruction. Laserbeak dodged madly -- somewhere under that rubble was the alloygator, the assassin, and the bladeframe, but he had no sensors for them now. A wall rose up before him -- dead end! -- and he cast a glance back just in time to see the spines of the monster’s tail lashing upwards, to feel the radiated heat as the creature carved its way to the surface.

Laserbeak nearly collided with a once-pyroclastic fin of metal, and took refuge against the cool of the reverse side, keening as he tried to cling to the cool metal with broken talons. He vented hard, trembling badly, muted shades of color racing over his frame as he fought down panic, fought to control his own systems.

Something clacked nearby -- a cheep of terror escaped before Laserbeak could stifle it.

The bladeframe, limping, materialized from the dancing luminescence of molten silver. He hauled himself up to a vantage beneath Laserbeak, and looked up, optics gleaming. _//Well,//_ said the big symbiont, lifting a paw to examine the plating there. _//That was unexpected.//_

Laserbeak twisted his wedge-shaped head around. _//Unexpected!? What does it want? Where is it going? What the slag is that thing?!//_ The cavern rocked again, droplets of molten metal raining down. Something massive thudded, scraped, and the drakisframe roared again. The music had silenced, save for the echoes still filtering through the metal under Laserbeak’s chestplates.

 _//Clearly, it doesn’t want us,//_ said the bladeframe, nosing at a spot where one plate had been torn entirely away, leaving a raw open patch. Spots of molten silver, now solidified, made his back seem freckled. He limped a step to peer at the gaping hole in the ceiling, the edges still glowing with heat. _//Rather, something up there. On the surface.//_ His optics narrowed.

Laserbeak bit back a feedback squeal. _//Wait. You can’t seriously be thinking....//_

...but it seemed that the bladeframe was.

 _//Wait for me!//_ Laserbeak gasped, gliding out after the bigger symbiont as he prowled from their scanty shelter. The air had been baked, was radiant with heat. The cooler metal of the bladeframe’s pedes hissed against the hot surfaces as he leapt from one outcrop to another, light and swift. Following was easy; the sucking updraft was so strong that Laserbeak could hang midair with hardly a current running to his antigravs. Which still didn’t answer the question of what the frag the other symbiont was *doing*.

But the bladeframe was moving fast, leaving him no time to gawk. Something in the quality of the air changed -- the drakisframe had breached the surface -- and Laserbeak floated up into the still-glowing gap. The other symbiont followed swiftly, finding impossible footholds, leaping powerfully between rough ledges so narrow that even Laserbeak would have thought twice about trying to land.

Screams and cries of rage filtered down to them now, audible even over the roar of the drakisframe and the thundering fall of half-slagged metal. Wings pumping, Laserbeak shot up --

\-- into the same music hall he’d crept through, just a joor ago. The entire structure was ruined, the very walls cracked where the drakisframe had slammed its tail. The entire monster was free, an undulating scarlet nightmare, all spines and plates as thick as a driller’s. Screaming mecha mobbed the entrances, fighting to escape. Others had already begun firing back, but large weapons weren’t permitted in the musichalls, and simple lasers and solid rounds did little against a creature so big. The creature didn’t even seem to notice, was instead ripping methodically through the stage. In all the chaos, Laserbeak couldn’t spot Tidepull. Fragging monster! If it ate Tidepull before Laserbeak even got to listen to his music, the flightframe would just, he’d just--!

Than a second, even more horrible thought occurred to him. His master, his cohort-brothers--they had intended to be at this performance as well! He spiralled upwards, trying to spot his carrier through the smoke-fogged chaos, dodging a sweeping lash of a spined tail. _//Master! Impedance, master, are you there, are you hurt?//_ he commed, reaching through the haze of overlapping frequencies for the thread of his cohort-channel. _//Phase, Soundbite--can you hear me? Please say you’re all right ... Primus, I didn’t think, I didn’t realize--//_

 _//Laserbeak? We’re here, we’re outside,//_ came Impedance’s answering call, solid and reassuringly clear, and Laserbeak clung to his master’s voice, letting it calm his incipient panic. _//We were towards the rear … where are you? Can you reach us?//_ Laserbeak could feel his master reaching, taking in the damage Laserbeak had sustained. _//What happened?//_

 _//I--//_ Laserbeak took in the ruins of the soundhall, the fleeing mecha, others still struggling to free themselves from the rubble. Took in the cause of that destruction, scarlet and silver and glowing with heat, as the drakisframe reared back, raising a fanged helm to the sky to release another audial-shattering roar, smoke pluming from its jaws. Primus, where did he even start?

 _//I’m coming, Mas--//_ he stopped short as he spotted a familiar form beyond the drakis’ bulk. It was the bladeframe. Somehow he had climbed up a broken wall--as Laserbeak watched, he leaped onto a dangerously-tilting girder, and from there, heaved himself onto the broken roof above.

 _//Master … I have to check on something.//_ Resolutely ignoring his carrier’s protests, Laserbeak flew upwards to where the bladeframe sat, his silver-speckled helm lifted to the sky as if admiring the view. “What are you doing!?” he called, one optic on the chaos below. “We need to get out of here!”

“No need,” the bladeframe said coolly. “Help is almost here.”

“Help? What kind of help is going … to …” Laserbeak turned in tight circle, scanning the horizon, trying to see whatever the bladeframe saw--and almost fell out of the sky.

Glowing like stars from the heat of their passage, twinned airframes dropped down from the sky. The first was plated in ebony and twilight blue, armor gleaming, the lethal mounts of weapons Laserbeak didn’t even have a name for bristling from beneath wings and on his chassis. But the second …

Just as large, the second airframe was sleek, barely armored at all--and gold, shining gold like the heart of the sun, accented with vivid turquoise brighter than any mortal plating had a right to be.

It was the Prime. As inconceivable as it seemed--Solus Prime had come to Tarn.

Wingtips carving stark white contrails through the thin atmosphere, the Prime and Protector streaked through the clouded skies. Lord High Protector Themis landed first, transforming while still a hundred mechanometers away, limbs and plating shifting in the fastest transformation Laserbeak had ever seen. Sheer momentum carried him to the rooftop; he landed like thunder, his pedes cratering the surface.

The Protector was lighter and more built for speed than most warframes, but there was unparalleled power in every part of that frame. Weapons cycled, swung into place, components splitting and reassembling into a heavy sonic cannon. A single tightly-directed pulse, and the great crystal dome of the musichall seemed suddenly to expand, a lingering instant, each plate ringing, parting... and falling in sand and shards across the chaos below.

Solus landed, pure grace, just as the wavefront of the dyad's speed hit the rooftop, scouring it.

Laserbeak squawked, trying to land, scrabbling for talon-holds as he was tumbled by the sudden gale. He hit the prickly side of something and then a pede came down, pinning him in place until the turbulence had passed. Blinking to clear dust from his optics, Laserbeak craned his helm around the bladeframe’s bulk, just in time to watch that brilliant golden form swing lightly down into the gap Themis had blasted.

Swung down into the music hall--where the drakisframe yet rampaged.

“No! Nononono!” Laserbeak struggled, and the bladeframe released him to flail and hop to the rim of broken crystal, dodging Themis’s massive, fluted pedes. The Prime would be slain, crushed under scarlet spines and plates, that slender golden frame crumpling like foil under the monster’s terrible weight!

Below, amidst the chaos and the dust, the drakis rounded on Solus Prime. From here, Laserbeak could see everything, all of it, as if the scene were caught in mercury: the scything rattle as the creature’s jaws snapped shut, the flowing ripple as it twisted its long body to face the sun-bright Prime, the vapor that hissed between those greatsword teeth.

Solus lifted his helm, delicate sensory crest flared as if in curiosity, the elegant curves of his body relaxed. And then, before Laserbeak could dive over the edge, could cycle up his little laser -- no matter that it would do no good -- the Prime spoke.

It was a word older than Laserbeak, older than modern language. The word was simple, had no modifiers, crafted in a time when glyphs had been simple and elemental. It rang through the shattered musichall, echoing, acoustics as perfect as they’d been for Tidepull.

And in the word was peace.

Beside Laserbeak, the Lord High Protector Themis -- justice made metal -- folded down on one pede. While below, the drakisframe had stopped short, that deadly helm tilting, regarding the figure before it. It exvented harshly, heat coiling up even to the rooftop, gathered its haunches beneath itself... and laid down, huge plates of its underchassis coiling over the stage and no few of the seats, long saber spines settling back against its crest. Dust and small debris settled unnoticed over its long frame.

Distantly, Laserbeak realized that his lasermounts had powered down. He couldn’t recall taking them offline.

Static sputtered a few times, cleared. “My Prime,” said the drakisframe.

Solus Prime spread his hands in welcome. “Conflagration. It has been a long time.”

“Yes.” The creature’s--Conflagration--vocalizer was growling and rough with disuse, popping with static distortions. Laserbeak could do nothing but watch in disbelief. How could such a monster also be a mech? It seemed inconceivable. “I was … damaged. I slept.” That head tilted, with the air of a mech checking his chronometer. “A very long time. Until … I heard your call. Then I came.”

“I am glad that you have returned to us, Conflagration,” Solus Prime said, his voice heavy with warm resonances, with reassurance. “Though I do not think it was my call to arms you heard.” He cast about the wreckage, obviously scanning for something. Then he headed to a bit of collapsed rubble, bent, and heaved it up off of the huddled form of … Tidepull? Laserbeak’s optics widened, and he sagged a little in relief. Tidepull wasn’t dead!

“It is an extraordinary maestro indeed who can replicate a Prime’s Call,” Solus continued, giving the battered, dust-covered Tidepull a hand up, lifting the smaller frame to his pedes with easy strength. His field was radiant, glowing with _happiness/discovery._ “Tidepull, I would introduce you to Conflagration. An old guardian, and a friend, once thought lost--and now found again through your call.”

Tidepull swayed on his pedes, optics wide and overwhelmed as he looked up--and up--at the drakisframe. “I--it is an honor?” Despite the smooth, golden-toned words, the maestro seemed to be not at all sure whether he meant them.

From his vantage point high above, Laserbeak watched the maestro and the drakisframe eye each other warily, and couldn’t suppress a cheep of giddy relief. The sound drew a pair of the Lord High Protector’s optics, gleaming crimson, embers against the black of his faceplates. The Protector’s voice, when he spoke, was the deep rumble of history, one half of the balance that guided the world. “Well done,” said Themis, talons reaching out to stroke Laserbeak’s small helm. It felt like a benediction. “Both of you.”

And then the Lord High Protector rose, and dropped down into the ruined musichall, joining his Prime, the Maestro, and the vast crimson warmech, moving to help retrieve the injured.

Laserbeak felt like his struts might have melted. There was the scraping of metal--deliberate, he now knew--and he looked up as the bladeframe prowled forward to sit beside him, tail curling lazily over the edge of the gap. _//H... how did you know?//_ Laserbeak asked him, awed at what he was witnessing.

 _//I have seen drakisframes before. A long, long time ago ... they were once the guardians of the Prime, the Lord High Protector’s own elite force.//_ The bladeframe tilted his head obliquely, slanting a look at graceful dyad working together. _//Calling my carrier, and letting him call for the Prime, seemed the most expedient solution.//_

 _//Most exp--//_ Laserbeak opened and closed his beak soundlessly. What kind of symbiont spoke of calling upon the Prime so casually? _//Wha--*who* are you?//_

The bladeframe made a chuffing, subtly amused sound. _//Just a spy. My carrier is Resonance, and my designation... is Ravage.//_

 

 

 

******

  
The memory fell away from him, fragmenting, fading too fast. _//Master,//_ Laserbeak’s glyph, edged in warning.

Coming out of recharge was more difficult that it had ever been, the countless glyphs of his symbionts’ thoughts drifting in ribbons of worry around him, forcing his processors to ramp up with unnatural rapidity. After the warm haven of Laserbeak’s memory, it was like stepping into bitter cold. Core code check, still running in the background, was as yet only 47% complete; the program had uncovered thirteen errors.

But his most vital systems were clean, restored. The forced charge, fed from the berth’s attachment, had filled his capacitors. _//Master,//_ this glyph was Ravage’s, sharper at the edges. _//Two mecha are lingering in the corridor outside. They speak of harm.//_

Rapidly, regretfully, Soundwave shut down the error check and withdrew his hardlines from his murmuring cohort. Focus sharpened, he found Ravage -- tight coils of shadowed code made indistinct by distance and the walls between them, but whispering murder all the same. There were two columns of coding beside the door to his barracks, and while he could not hear their furtive comms, he could see, could _taste/smell/feel_ their intentions in rising in daggering spines from a morass of pale, jealous green.

_-eight times the energon and for what a civilian piece of slag stupid fragger walked into the messhall like he owned it perfect on all the training mods crawl back to some allotment at a databank thinking he’s better nice little plasma blade didn’t even answer Bitpush teach a lesson about respect guzzling a warframe’s fuel-_

_//Ratbat, Flipsides, dock,//_ he ordered, gathering them to him, ignoring Ratbat’s sleepy meep of protest. Down the hall, Ravage’s code cycled hot, firing directives coiling in his weapons mounts. _//Negative, Ravage,//_ Soundwave directed, before the symbiont could ask.

Secondaries retracting, Soundwave reached for the hatch panel with one primary, even as he rose to his pedes. Rumble and Frenzy darted to either side of the doorway at his directive, Laserbeak hanging back.

Soundwave disabled the lighting, already set to recharge-low, flooding the room with darkness. Then he keyed the door.

The panel slid back on a pair of squat warframes, one a bottom-level communications frame, the other a rough-plated maintenance bot -- both of them frozen in a moment of shock, indecision.

Three of his primaries, the tips each spiked into a horror of knives and chisels, whipped out with all the speed Soundwave could muster, wrapped around the maintenance bot’s helm and chest. And dragged him into the pitch-black barracks.  The hatch slammed shut and locked behind him with an unnatural rumble.

The floor and the walls shook as Soundwave slammed the shrieking mech’s backplates against the wall. “Query, Buildup, intended to use this?” He slid the mech’s own plasma dagger menacingly near Buildup’s jerking cervical cables.

“N-no!” the mech screamed, struggling, as knives sheared into the wall, trapping his hands above his helm. The plates of the wall were heaving behind him, horribly alive. The only light was the malevolent gleam of Soundwave’s visor, and a red glow like optics, mere pinpricks in the dark.

“Soundwave: believes otherwise.” More blades, unseen in the darkness, burrowed into Buildup’s exposed cabling, saw-toothed edges grating over sensory beds.

“Nonono! Never, I swear it on P-Primus, please--”

Laserbeak landed on Soundwave’s pauldron, beak snapping with a sound like shearing metal. “Let me take his optics, Master--” the delicate flightframe hissed, and ran a little more power to the indicator lights across his chassis. His wingplates flared and uplifted, his nanites a brilliant pink -- to a very disoriented mech, it might seem that every plate of his body was an energon blade, edged with glowing charge.

Buildup certainly believed so. “No! Please, I’ll never, -never, oh Primus, guardians preserve me, Primus!”

Soundwave made no effort to modulate the flat, grating tones of his vocalizer. “Your plans, obvious. Consequences of any future attempts, lethally memorable. Soundwave: will know. Soundwave: hears _everything_.”

Rumble and Frenzy rushed to help as he keyed open the door again. The communications mech, pounding on the hatch, nearly tumbled in -- and then crashed back as the two mechkin helped Soundwave heave Buildup’s flailing chassis atop him.

Soundwave sent a quick command, the hatch irising shut once again, but it proved unnecessary -- both mecha were already flailing, clawing over each other in their haste to regain their pedes and flee.

“Boss boss boss! That was so cool!”

“Y-yeah, kick aft! We m-made him leak coolant on hisself!” his youngest two mechkin darted around Soundwave’s pedes, transforming their little impact weapons back into arms. The floorplates were badly dented where they’d stood.

“Perhaps.” Soundwave listened to the terrified mech drag his companion down the corridor, babbling madly.

It was still three-quarters of a joor before his shift was due to start. Not enough time to attempt a further check of his core coding. He lifted a talon to stroke Laserbeak’s helm, the symbiont’s code a swirling furnace of fierce delight and satisfaction.

Soundwave stood for a moment, reassuring Flipsides, permitting Ravage and Buzzsaw to shadow the two hapless mecha. Then he keyed open the hatch.

He had a great deal to do before he and his cohort would be safe, let alone the others.

Might as well begin early.


	6. Chapter 6

The events of the morning would only be the start of it, Soundwave knew. Neither of the two mecha had placed the spying device in Soundwave’s quarters, after all. Nor had anyone else on this work-level, so far as Soundwave could tell.

Huddling in this forgotten corner of the army, hoping to escape notice, was no option at all. When more powerful players made their move -- and they would -- Soundwave would need to be ready, would need to have a full deck of resources, information, and favors to play from. And as long as he was careful and clever, this little network could be the start of that power base.

Relay’s command was primarily a transfer station. It handled only a small portion of the low priority data-loads for much of the army training or living in Kaon, and a few of the newly-established southern outposts. The haste of its construction was clear to any mech that cared to look, with hardware composed of a mismatched jumble of recycled civilian servers, save for a handful of necessary military consoles. The codebases that hardware ran off weren’t much better, Soundwave found--a mishmash of overlapping commands and firewalls that bogged down data-transfers that fought each other for primacy in the command-queues. Quite similar, in point of fact, to the Arena.

Soundwave had been forced, over the past ten vorn or so, to vastly expand the Arena network’s capabilities beyond even what the normal spikes of vid- and comm-traffic required for Arena events. Chronicler-cohorts in particular sent a great deal of information back and forth when outside natural comm range, and needed a good network to support those transmissions. To have ten thousand chronicler carriers all in the same city, all reporting to each other and to Soundwave’s cohort, had required an *exceptional* network. And over the course of building one, Soundwave had learned more than a few tricks--tricks he intended to put to good use here as well.

While Flipsides tapped away at the touchscreens of a console behind him, Soundwave delved through the layers of addressing and architectures that were the purpose of this command post. His trimming, performed the orn previous, had integrated nicely. But while significantly neater, the flows of information still weren’t taking their most optimal course, were bottlenecking as comm transfers and encrypted data packets struggled to squeeze past each other. _//Laserbeak, status?//_ Soundwave inquired, checking on his symbiont’s progress among cables long sealed away within these walls.

 _//We are nearly there,//_ Laserbeak replied, turning tight on his tail to hop back a step, and help drag Frenzy with beak clamped carefully around the mechkin’s arm.

 _//T-this is great, Boss!//_ Frenzy added, and Soundwave could feel the mechkin’s brother push at his pedes. The tunnels where the cables were strung and core processors hidden away were very tight spaces, inaccessible to most non-repair frametypes--but not to symbionts. Relegating his current allotment of comm-traffic to a secondary thread--Relay had only handed him only a third of the total workload available, which hardly required his full attention--Soundwave tracked their progress, even as he idly pruned down recursive coding, adding his own security measures and stripping out redundant civilian-grade firewalls. Soundwave was fully aware that the praefectus expected him to fail miserably at dealing with this amount of comm traffic, which would normally take at least three fully-framed communications mecha to handle. But then, it was obvious from the outset that Relay had little experience with Chronicler-class mecha, much less an archivist of Soundwave’s caliber.

A warbuild comm officer was compact, and could fight, haul gear, or set up remote network outposts with nothing but his own equipment. They were built to take heavy fire and still keep communications running. They were well-suited to their function, but they were generalists. Soundwave, however, was a specialist: every bit of his frame optimized for two functions--the protection of symbionts, and the sorting and transfer of data. Compared to the constant influx of dense, highly technical interlinked data he had once handled at the Academe, even the voluminous comm traffic at this station was little challenge.

Laserbeak had squeezed around another tight corner; Soundwave could feel the flightframe’s relief as he hopped down into a wider gap, letting his exterior plating unflatten, flaring wings a little. Turning, Laserbeak grabbed Frenzy’s reaching hand with his beak, hauling him unceremoniously out of the tunnel, with Rumble not far behind.

_//Ow! Watch it--ya almost kicked me in the optic, slagger!//_

_//It’s your own fragging fault for gettin’ so close. Maybe if you hadn’t been pushing on my aft--//_

_//You don’t wanna get pushed, maybe you shouldn’tve gotten stuck on that last turn!//_

_//--Rumble. Frenzy. Task at hand: requires your attention.//_ Soundwave interjected when it seemed the squabbling was going to get out of hand. _//Query: interchange repeater found?//_

 _//We have it, Master,//_ Laserbeak replied. He opened his end of the link, allowing Soundwave to see the malfunctioning bit of equipment through his optics. The repeater’s housing was pitted and worn with age; originally civilian-grade equipment, it had been on the verge of obsolescence even before it had been installed. Now it was failing completely, corrupting transmissions randomly, its thoroughput a fraction of what it should be. _//The main lines are frayed as well--they will need to be cut and rewired.//_ A task much more easily accomplished by Rumble and Frenzy’s small hands than Laserbeak’s talons. _//Prepping the auxiliary lines now. Are you ready to handle the extra input?//_

 _//Affirmative,//_ Soundwave said, opening up a secondary channel through his hardline link. Acting as a mech-sized data-transfer interchange was, in essence, what he had been framed for, if on a far larger scale. Handling the data-load from one small repeater was well within his abilities, and would ensure that there was no disruption of comm-traffic while his symbionts rid the network of the malfunctioning device and made repairs.

Laserbeak took the repeater offline, shunting incoming signals over to Soundwave. The carrier accepted them with a certain amount of distaste, resigning himself to having another tertiary processing thread full of mundane comm-traffic, supplies movements, and warframe gossip. He idly began picking apart some of the low-level encryption algorithms, trying to see how they were generated, looking for the underlying logic patterns and origination keys.

It took the three symbionts fully half the shift to clean out the repeater and scavenge semi-useful parts from it, to repair the wiring, and finally to install one of the many pieces of spare hardware that Soundwave had collected from the Arena storerooms before he left. When it came online, the post’s rate of errors dropped by half, rates stabilized... and network capacity jumped nine percent. The next repair netted similar benefits. And the next, and the next.

Several duty-cycles passed in this work. His cohort made repairs, spied on their fellow mecha, and chased or created rumors as necessary. Soundwave handled all the work Relay could give him and more, all the while surreptitiously tweaking the network to ever-expanding efficiency.

Inevitably, his changes were discovered.

Praefectus Relay’s reaction was predictable; Soundwave could have foreseen the warframe’s response even without the module’s assistance. This, too, he had dealt with before. While the words were different, the rant was almost identical to Clench’s tirades, matching note-for-note in vitriol and indignation.

“--who you think you are, coming in here? You think you’re in charge? That you can just rearrange the Lord High Protector’s networks on a whim? You are nobody, Chronicler! You have no rank, no authority, and you should be on your slagging kneeplates thanking Primus and every slagging officer you meet that you were even allowed in! Not acting like you own the place, much less rewiring official equipment or sending your little drones into restricted areas! You want to make changes to the slagging network, you ASK permission first--and if you’re lucky, I MIGHT say yes. You got that, *decanus*?” Relay stalked around him, armor bristling with anger, field flaring in scarlet curls of temper. But underneath it, Soundwave could read the subtle weave of speculation, the quicksilver sparks of calculation, of realization.

“Soundwave: acknowledges,” he replied, safely inscrutable behind visor and battlemask. “Query: Praefectus wishes changes to be rescinded?”

“You fragging well know I don’t!” And there it was, the leverage he was looking for, nested in among the other spikes of worry, speculation, and greed. A little more power routed to the module, and Soundwave could separate out the exact parameters from the background: a particularly nice mainframe, stolen from an intercepted Senate convoy. It was one of many; the others had been distributed to far more vital communications posts. But this one had been held in reserve, a lure to enjoin these satellite installations to meet higher standards. A mainframe like that would expand a comm post, more mecha might be assigned, a praefectus might someday aspire to a higher rank of his own. Relay had consigned himself to losing.

Except. The praefectus had just finished putting in a request for a fifty percent increase in data load. And that... put this little command post back in the running. Somewhat.

“Command: acknowledged. Soundwave: will request confirmation, before taking action.”

The carrier’s eerily ready capitulation took Relay somewhat aback. “Good, see that you do.”

“Soundwave: will require access to post equipment stores.”

“What the frag--! You just can’t quit slagging pushing your Pit-damned luck--”

“New cabling, required in many locations, will increase capacity. Soundwave: cannot efficiently distribute equipment, without knowing what we have.” A partial lie; he’d seen the outgoing requisitions, scanty though they were. If worst came to worst, he could probably dig up the information from Relay’s own cortex.

The Praefectus leaned forward, trying to use his mass to intimidate. “YOU don’t allocate material. I slagging allocate the damn material!”

“Affirmative. Soundwave: will request confirmation for all changes. Soundwave: cannot direct Praefectus Relay’s attention to most efficient upgrades, if supplies inventory unknown.”

Relay gave the carrier a hard look. Suspicion warred with greed, both twining and twisting through his neural net, hazing the air around every processor.

Soundwave tipped the balance. “Projected load increase, three hundred percent.” Which was, coincidentally, a few percent over the number required to surpass the best of the small communications posts. Provided those other stations made no gains in the next orns.

Relay snorted. “Primus save me from fragging idiots. Fine, you think you’re that hot? You’ll get the access codes -- and if I don’t see three hundred percent in the next...” the Praefectus pretended to think, “decaorn, you’re stripped of your commission and back on the street.”

Relay did not have the power to decommission Soundwave, but he could recommend the move to his superiors. Still, it would not come to that. “Soundwave, will require twenty three orn.” Coincidentally, the same time the mainframe would be awarded.

Had he pushed too much? Relay’s optics narrowed, suspicions hazing the lines of his code. Still, whatever his thoughts were, he chose not to verbalize them. “Fine. You get what you need, if we got it to spare, but I ain’t ordering anything special for your little project.”

Soundwave inclined his helm. Relay would order whatever he could, the carrier judged, provided he nurtured that streak of greed. “Soundwave, acknowledges.”

\------

The inventory proved disappointing. Particularly when compared with the equipment that Soundwave had built up over his vorns at the Arena -- but then, that expansion had taken a great deal of time, which he did not have now. Free access to better cables and spare parts, with a certain amount of wrangling and bargaining, certainly helped, but it would not be enough to accomplish his goals.

Buzzsaw and Laserbeak both knew the Arena network quite well, and Soundwave twice sent them across Kaon to... ‘find’ certain small, yet vital parts, but he disliked exposing them to danger for such unimportant tasks. And, to be honest, the thought of disassembling something he had spent vorn in building did not sit well with the carrier.

To Ratbat, Soundwave assigned the task of trading Soundwave’s surplus rations for either parts or highgrade, which was more valuable and easier to store. Ravage provided backup for the little glideframe, should he need it. But energon had become cheap in Kaon, for the first time in an aeon, and wargrade rations brought relatively little.

And so Soundwave turned his attention to another untapped resource: the mecha who worked in silence at the terminals beside him.

Despite the limitations of their frames, very few of them were useless. They all had extensive training, and were, almost to a mech, entirely dedicated in their service to the Lord High Protector. Not a few had been re-drafted from the gutters, had narrowly escaped the fate of the empties. They owed their lives to this war.

Soundwave began to track their activities. While over a dozen mecha overlapped different portions of his shift, only three were on the exact same duty schedule as the carrier: Bitgap, Pulsepush, and Retro. Bitgap was particularly good at shunting dataflows on the fly; almost five percent quicker at the task than the other mecha on this work-level. Pulsepush, however, preferred analytics. After spending some time double-checking each mech’s results and without commentary or fanfare, Soundwave began to shunt each mech’s preferred data channels to their stations. Both warframes were too proficient at their function not to notice the change, of course, and Soundwave made no effort to hide what he had been doing. Nothing had been said--yet--but Bitgap and Pulsepush had lost some measure of their resentment towards the civilian in their midst. While Soundwave was not technically their superior, they became fractionally more cooperative, more willing to accept suggestions. And to offer assistance of their own, when Soundwave made a point of consulting them.

Retro, however... Retro was inefficient. Perhaps the slowest in the post, at least at certain tasks, Retro consistently showed up late and dropped threads. _//Apparently,//_ Buzzsaw murmured quietly from his place on Soundwave’s shoulder, during one of the moments when the carrier surfaced from the rushing flow of data, _//he’s one of the few who was never dismissed from communications, even during the worst cuts. Long service record. Mecha say he used to be pretty good, before he glitched.//_

 _//Observation, intriguing,//_ Soundwave said, pulling up memory-files of the other comm-officer and regarding them speculatively. To have survived as an active duty officer this long, without losing his commission like so many others, meant that Retro must be exceptionally talented at his function. Yet that no longer seemed to be true. Why? _//Query: source of Retro’s glitch known?//_

Buzzsaw dipped his helm, shrugging his wings in a subtle negative, wary of any watching optics in the quiet control room. _//Dunno, boss. No one else seems to know, either. His glitch isn’t bad enough yet to need attention by the division code-specialists. Or if it is, he’s done a good job of hiding it.//_ Which, Soundwave had discovered, was not all that unusual. Military-focussed code specialists tended to prize functionality over comfort or individuality, and were notorious for being more than willing to bring out the big guns--memory file purges, core code rewrites or cortex-node reformatting-- when it came to eradicating warframe code-glitches. And if the warframes in question lost more than they’d bargained for in the process--well, sometimes a blade had to be melted down before it could be reforged.

No, it was not surprising that Retro had not sought out a medic’s attention. Not when doing so was also likely to draw attention to his recent subpar performance. Still, the mystery caught Soundwave’s attention. Thus far, he had not paid a great deal of attention to Retro, occupied as he had been with network upgrades and the subtle (and occasionally not so subtle) attempts by some of the other warframes to sabotage his work. But now, his interest was piqued.

Both Laserbeak and Buzzsaw were too busy with other duties to shadow Retro. So Ratbat, small and easily overlooked, took up the duty of watching the communications mech, observing where he went, whom he talked to. Soundwave himself took care to observe Retro closely, during their shared duty-shifts and encounters at the dispensary or other public areas. And what he saw only deepened the mystery.

For Retro *was* a brilliant communications officer. Capable, able to handle multiple complex comm channels without so much as a singled dropped data-bit. His encryptions and encodings were exacting and precise, his relays strong and clear. A consummate professional, the veteran officer was obviously a mech well-familiar with his function and deserving of his commission--

\--except when he wasn’t.

During those times, Retro’s performance was … mediocre at best. The mech seemed distracted, fumbling at tasks he had performed effortlessly only the shift before. Anything more complex than standard encryption keys seemed to baffle him, his packet-processing speed dropped by nearly 46 percent, and his desperation was plain to see, even without the module’s aid, as he dropped almost a tenth of his assigned conversions and channel-bounces.

The glitch seemed to be sporadic, unpredictable in both timing and duration. From what Soundwave could see, watching the tangled, chaotic glyph-threads stream pass over that hunched frame, Retro himself did not seem to know what had caused this code-corruption. Soundwave could not afford to unleash the module’s full abilities, not while he was on duty, but simple observation seemed to indicate two sets of competing coding. The first set was Retro, veteran comm officer, amiable and dedicated to his work. The second set … was also Retro, but different. And Soundwave had to admit, watching the tangle of that second set of glyphs, that he was not yet sure exactly what that coding had been intended to do.

Shortly before his next shift, Retro departed his quarters. Ratbat reported every move, fluttering along close to the ceiling as he followed, as he’d done for the past few orn. But Retro wasn’t headed for the energon dispensary, or parts supplies, or recreation... but towards the rooftop.

The comm officer’s behavior was undeniably strange -- he walked without much trouble, but had to make several tries to correctly signal the elevator ident-reader. _//Overcharged?//_ Ratbat queried, slipping through an already-loosened vent, and from there into the elevator shaft. He could not arrow straight up as well as the flightframes, but the shaft’s updraft made for an easy ascent.

 _//Possible,//_ Soundwave allowed, pausing before he triggered the hatch to enter the workstation. But Retro wasn’t staggering like an overcharged mech. And why the roof? It made little sense. Soundwave pinged the mech he’d be replacing, letting him know that the carrier would be late, and ignored the irate reply. Then he turned on his heel, and headed for the roof access.

Above, Retro levered a half-rusted hatch open, and stepped out onto the chill rooftop, Ratbat flitting invisibly behind. As if at a loss, the comm officer turned, walked slowly to one of the transmission clusters that monitored parts of the southern army. Stubby panels spreading, Retro hardlined in and stood silently -- either receiving something or transmitting; Ratbat couldn’t tell.

But Soundwave could. Not for nothing had his symbionts tapped carefully into every node and repeater in this network. Soundwave had directed the repairs himself. Retro’s few extra threads were difficult to distinguish from all the other traffic... but not impossible.

Their encryption was too dense to hack. But Soundwave could track the destination without undue trouble.

Iacon.

 _//Ratbat, remain hidden,//_ Soundwave ordered, transforming to take a back ramp with greater speed. _//Do not engage.//_

 _//Okay. It’s not like he’s doing much anyway,//_ came the slightly peevish reply. But Ratbat stayed at his post, clinging to the underside of a length of piping, watching and listening intently, as Soundwave headed upwards.

Soundwave transformed well before he got to the roof hatch, not wanting the growl of his engine to give him away. He could only muster a bare shadow of Ravage’s stealth, unfortunately, just enough to know when to keep to the shadows, when to move and when to keep still to avoid being spotted. He soon discovered he hardly needed to bother; Retro was fully engrossed in his transmission, oblivious to his surroundings. It was a strange flaw for a spy to have; most communications mecha, especially military-grade ones, were quite adept at monitoring their surroundings for danger even as they performed their assigned duties. It was yet another inconsistency, and Soundwave noted it, even as he set it aside.

He approached Retro’s still form, observing the dense flow of the transmission. The encryption was multilayered, completely different from any he had seen so far, and impossible to decode on the fly.

Retro’s own thoughts, however, had no such protection.

Soundwave stepped forward, behind the unaware mech … and relaxed his hold on the module. Reaching outward, ignoring Ratbat’s familiar, glowing haze of _satisfaction/irritation/interest_ behind him, the background data of the mechanisms, the very walls and conduits around them, Soundwave narrowed his focus to a bladed edge, and sliced inward, past Retro’s firewalls.

Firewalls that turned out to be tattered, eroded things, fragile as metalmesh. Deeply conflicted, competing sets of protocols warred with each other, ignoring his intrusion entirely; torn holes in the datawalls whispered of old, old violations to the module’s perceptions, spoke of _-blades-_ and _-tearing-_ and _-rape-_ that had never healed--had never been allowed to heal. For beyond those holes …. Soundwave paused, trying to make sense of the tangle of glyphs, clashing color overlaid over color. There was … a ravine in Retro’s core functions, a fissure. Retro existed on both sides of that fissure, but while one side was familiar-- _-dutypridefunctionobedience Retro officercommunicationcontent--_ the other was alien, a strange warping of -- _secretsreportingobediencechains Retro unhappysabotagestealthisolationanxiety._

Retro, Soundwave realized, had been hacked. Whoever had done the job had been thorough, had laid down entirely new core coding. Given Retro’s long career as a trusted and valuable comm officer, it did not take a spymaster to figure out who had ordered this violation.

It was not in Soundwave’s nature to act with undue haste. There could be some way to use this development, to exploit this leak in the Lord High Protector’s information network at a later date, when he knew more about the Senate’s interest in this little communications outpost. And perhaps he could trace the chain of command, find the hand that moved this pawn. Allowing this seep of information to remain would impact his short-term goals, yes -- Retro would be impaired, decreasing the efficiency of the post as a whole, and....

...and as Soundwave watched, the last of the communication officer’s chains relaxed its grip on Retro’s higher processing, and executed a simple demand for any other potentially relevant information. Still unaware that he was transmitting, the communication bot’s processors lit up with flashes, moments, memories. And, twisted in among that cataract of thoughts was the thread of Soundwave’s designation glyph -- elegant, simple, bolstered by the shadows of seven smaller modifiers.

Soundwave struck, quick as thought. His talons hooked into open transmission panels, primaries whiplashing around joints and helm to drag Retro down, disrupting the transmission of that glyph before it could be made.

The commbot’s battle protocols ignited in a storm of crimson and orange. Landing on his backplates, the smaller mech came up out of his stupor fighting, parrying away Soundwave’s cables with talons, one arm already transforming into a shortblade. Hot purple desperation clouded his coding, all out of proportion with the physical threat he thought Soundwave represented: the new carrier _-would find out tell everyone deliver Retro to the clutches of the code eaters the specialists the prying worming trojans sieving through unmaking kill him keep it quiet-_

Soundwave plucked the transformation coding from the mech’s plating, snarled it, jerked a cable out of the way before Retro’s claws could catch it. The comm officer hit him midbody; Soundwave scrambled for footing, pedes skidding as both mecha crashed down in a thrashing tangle.

“Cease!” Soundwave ordered, seizing Retro by the cervical cables, the tensors groaning under his taloned grip. “Retro: wishes superiors to know of this?” He intercepted another instinctive, spy-coded comm burst, muffling it into unintelligibility with a wash of static.

Talons scrabbled against his plating, scoring it, and Retro gave one last heave--then abruptly subsided. Soundwave watched as _anger/fear/confusion_ rippled throughout the smaller mech’s field, the lines of thought-glyphs twisting beneath that plating, conflicting, the spy being subsumed back under the loyal officer. It was obvious that Retro knew something was desperately, terrifyingly wrong. Equally obvious: he did not know *what.* “What the frag--? S-Soundwave? Where--what are you talking about? Get off of me!”

Soundwave did not move, considering his captive carefully. A long game with this information was now impossible. Unless, perhaps … Retro could be persuaded to cooperate. Turning the Senate’s spy against them could yield a wealth of information, of possibilities, if done with a subtle hand.

“Release, not possible,” Soundwave told the smaller mech. Playing at sympathy was not Soundwave’s strong suit, but he did the best he could, letting his field flare with regret and determination both. Retro was a good officer, after all. It would be a shame to lose a piece with such potential. “Retro: has been hacked.” The words were brutal, stark in their simplicity, and the comm mech recoiled in revulsion.

“What? That’s impossible! There’s no way--I haven’t been anywhere near--I would know if some mech had been-! My security protocols and firewalls are-”

“Retro’s firewalls, compromised. Enemy hack: rewrite of core coding and personality, partitioned from the original. Memory-nodes, similarly fractured, reporting only to their designated code cores.” Such attacks were not unheard of, though normally the intent of such an attack was to wipe the core coding clean, or to fragment memory-archives and personality structures into uselessness. To attempt to fissure a mech’s mind in two and leave him still functioning, the original personality still intact as an unwitting cover, was something Soundwave had never seen attempted before.

Retro scowled up at him, mandibles bared in defiance. “You’re lying! There’s no way--”

Impatient with the smaller mech’s obstinacy, Soundwave cut Retro’s argument short with a ping, offering a short datafile of his observations. The file was concise, well tagged with time stamps and cross-referenced with Retro’s own erratic performance records. It ended with the transmission that Soundwave had observed only moments before, and that transmission’s intended destination.

“Retro: has made repeated, inexplicable mistakes in his assigned duties. Recent performance, erratic, unpredictable. Superiors: soon to take notice, will order you to report to code specialists. Likely outcome, demotion, other disciplinary actions, possible full core code wipe and reset. Deactivation, also a possibility if damage is too severe.” Even if Retro didn’t face execution for his unwitting treason, there was no way such a severely compromised comm officer would be allowed to retain his commission. He would be decommissioned, removed from the Lord Protector’s service, relegated to the ranks of useless civilian frametypes. With Cybertron rapidly spiralling towards civil war, his chances of survival would be almost nonexistent.

Beneath Soundwave’s talons, Retro had gone very still. Soundwave watched as frantic little thoughts tangled over the other mech’s helm, tarnished glyphs circling, searching for some way out of this trap.

“Soundwave: proposes alternate solution,” he told Retro, once he had judged the smaller mech’s desperation had reached an appropriate pitch.

Amber optics narrowed in suspicion, Retro said slowly, “What kind of solution?”

“Soundwave: could change the priority sequences in core coding, make second partition subordinate to the first, allow original personality core access to both sets of memory archives, command-queues. Implanted spy-coding, still active; but Decanus Retro, able to observe, to retake control.”

“Assuming I believe you could even do anything like that--which I don’t--what good would that do?” Retro said bitterly. But he was thinking about the possibility, at least.

“Retro: has unique opportunity to obtain actionable intelligence. Senate, unlikely to know their spy compromised until Retro fails to report. Opportunities to relay false information, to pinpoint enemy resources, numerous. Possibilities for promotion, recognition, if subterfuge is successful--also numerous.”

“For both of us. Which is why you haven’t turned me in yet,” Retro said, realization rippling across his field and faceplates both.

“Affirmative.”

The commofficer’s talons tightened on Soundwave’s forearms, cobalt plating creaking under the pressure. “My service performance?”

Soundwave tilted his helm. “Unhindered, once code bifurcation corrected.”

Retro studied the carrier suspiciously. “I don’t even know --” Soundwave watched as the comm officer reviewed the file Soundwave had packaged for him. It seemed impossible; Retro would never betray his own... and yet, it seemed he had. “How the frag could this have happened?”

Soundwave shrugged. “Memory, likely deleted.”

Retro gritted his mandibles, setting up strings to check for suspicious holes in his long-term data storage. What other explanation could there be? His malaise had begun long before Soundwave’s arrival, so blaming the cobalt carrier, while an attractive option, made no logical sense.

“How exactly do you plan to...” Retro cast a glance around the rooftop as best he could, while pinned beneath the carrier’s bulk, “...relay false information, and this other scrap? I’ve no clue what I’ve been sending. Or what this malware is looking for, or... or anything. What makes you think I’m gonna be able to tell what this coding is actually doing? And how the Pit do you know enough to go messing with a mech’s code?”

Soundwave considered. The bifurcation of coding was old, the chains worn deep and the encryption algorythms were nothing at all like those the carrier had handled. He noted some of the lines carefully -- perhaps one of his symbionts would recognize the patterns. But even if Retro regained control, became able to subsume the immediate demands of the spy coding, would he know exactly what information he leaked?

Perhaps; perhaps not. “Soundwave, has attended to similar condition.” His own, naturally, although the alien telepathy device wasn’t quite the same as a split and corrupted personality.

Retro stared up at him. This recoding risked turning him into little more than a drone, destroying a lifetime of archived character and habit. But Retro’s fate, when his inefficiencies got him inevitably dismissed from the army, would be worse. And the big carrier knew it too, the fragger. “You gotta be yanking my drivechain. When -- who the hell are you?”

“Soundwave: serves the Lord High Protector.” Soundwave interrupted Retro before the comm officer could voice the protest that rose up from the muddled scrap pile of his thoughts. “Time for consideration, short. Query, Retro’s decision?” The carrier unlimbered a pair of heavy primaries, the articulated sheathing rasping quietly, the multitools at the tips folded neatly together.

Retro looked between Soundwave and the tips of those cables, weighing his options, feeling out the edges of the schism in his own coding as well as he could.

“Do it,” said Retro.


	7. Chapter 7

Processing and directing Retro’s activities as a double agent -- once the mech recovered -- proved to be a far more interesting use of Soundwave’s abilities. While handling his share of the comm traffic on secondary threads, Soundwave bent the rest of his resources to the task of decoding each of Retro’s moves through the data network. 

Now aware of malignant code’s directives, Retro alerted Soundwave whenever the spy coding sent the comm officer after some nugget of data, or when it ordered him to either take on or avoid certain tasks. For now, Retro didn’t try to fight the orders, letting his alter ego do as his masters commanded. Soundwave, for his part, ran checks both before and afterwards on the data Retro handled. He couldn’t break most of the encryption, but he could both detect and correct the changes that Retro had made, and archive them for further consideration. And, when Retro reported to his Senate masters, Soundwave was watching: a shadow that trailed every propagated ripple across the datanet as far as he could. 

Mapping out the extent of this malignancy was a slow process, and more than a little like trying to determine the shape and nature of a leviathan with only a single sensor node. But the process, he found, was fascinating, each new trail unfurling a bit more of the web that had entangled Retro, one secret leading to the next and the next, often in unexpected ways. His symbionts, as intensely curious as their carrier, ranged eagerly between communication installations under his direction, slipping silently into disused conduits, flitting between broken buildings to wire new linkages into central servers. 

It was also a great deal of work, however, and Soundwave soon found himself grateful for the abundance of fuel and privacy.

Orn by orn, Soundwave untangled the knot of the mystery before him, making connections, drawing and testing conjectures. The first time Soundwave identified another hacked comm officer -- in another small station three hundred filum to the east -- was a jolt of pure triumph. Laserbeak and Buzzsaw confirmed their carrier’s findings, hitching a secretive ride on the underside of a transport drone, and then infiltrating the command post itself. As suspected, the comm officer exhibited almost the same symptoms as Retro, but to all appearances, had gone undetected by any save Soundwave himself.

Mapping, tracing, working around obstacles, careful not to let his own activity be too noticeable as his symbionts brought him pieces and clues -- following these data trails was very much like tracking down lost files in a vast academic network, and just as engaging. And slowly, inevitably, the tangle of secrets unwound underneath his talons, their patterns becoming clear. 

The next discovery was startlingly sudden, and came within the orn. Soundwave had been handling a particularly botched series of equipment requisition communiques when his active processing threads finished tracking down the next link in the chain of spies. Or rather, links--for the spy he had uncovered was not a single operative, as Retro was. He was a linchpin, a puppet-master with strings leading outward in all directions. 

Soundwave nearly dropped his assigned task. These results... couldn’t be right. Dozens -- over a hundred mecha, all handling sensitive data, all very likely hacked. Most were like Retro, pawns in a larger scheme. But not all -- the chain of mecha led ever upwards, expanding, extending to mecha who commanded thousands, whole divisions. Some of them were Legati. 

This was no isolated incident, but a pervasive and spreading rust. 

Soundwave had merely been looking for leverage, for an opportunity to bring his cohort to the notice of his superiors, but had instead stumbled into something far larger than he’d expected. Between one instant and the next, Soundwave’s safe little knot of a mystery dissolved into a treacherous morass: one in which any step might lead them all to the smelting pit. 

He’d been careful -- was always careful -- but now Soundwave set himself to retracing the paths he’d taken, searching out and erasing any sign of his presence. He was not coded for hacking, did not have the kind of deeply ingrained instincts that allowed him to sidestep datatraps, to navigate around betraying code-twigs with ease. But at least Soundwave had seen those kinds of tracing tags before, and knew to watch for them. Soundwave would know if he had left a trail. And surely no one would think to look for one, in any case.

Or so he hoped.

 _//Master,//_ Ravage interrupted. _//The post commander appears inordinately... stressed. He is entering the building with a mech whom I do not recognize.//_

Soundwave froze, processors generating and discarding scenarios. Had his infiltrations been noticed? Was the mech from Intelligence, or another puppet in this wide-flung game--or both? Were he and his cohort about to be implicated in Retro’s unwitting treason? Even with all the evidence he had uncovered, the pieces he now knew were on the board, Soundwave was not yet ready. He needed something stronger, a single, swift stroke that would make his accusations irrefutable, his position unassailable, when it came time to move. Without it …

Soundwave forced himself out of the ever-tightening spiral of paranoia and unfounded suspicions, killing those threads before they could taint his observations or paralyze him completely. There was no point in moving before a threat had even been identified; Soundwave needed to get closer, to read the interloper’s coding and judge the threat with his own optics.

He pinged Bitdepth as he pushed away from his duty station. _//Soundwave: going to pull comm logs from previous shift’s archives.//_ The other comm officer accepted his excuse without comment, returning a distracted glyph of acknowledgment; most of his primary processing threads were currently tied up with comm relays for a squabbling air wing above Kaon.

Exiting the monitoring center, Soundwave opened a far more private channel--this time, to Ravage. _//Ravage: status of post commander Relay? Destination, description of strange mech?//_ He reached out, a silent request for access to Ravage’s visual feed. The bladeframe allowed it without hesitation, and Soundwave watched through Ravage’s optics as the post commander led a short, lightly-built mech of unknown frametype past one security checkpoint after another. They were heading inwards, towards the heart of the little post--what was the mech after? That the post commander was outranked was clear to Ravage’s experienced eye: the praefectus’s gestures and glyphs were ingratiating, more polite than either the bladeframe or Soundwave had ever seen--a definite change from his usual brusque, businesslike demeanor. 

Soundwave moved faster. Running would attract notice, but he lengthened his stride, moving to intercept. The strange mech was lightly armored, plated in unremarkable green and gray. He moved with a fluid grace, however, like a dancer. Or an infiltrator.

Retro stepped out of a side hallway, blinked as he found himself right in the carrier’s path. “Soundwave?” said the comm officer, falling in beside Soundwave. “You’ve been assigned to this fragging waste-of-time inspection, too?”

Soundwave’s step hitched. “Inspection,” he said flatly. 

Retro read more into Soundwave’s tone than was there. “Yeah,” he shrugged. “For space. Shouldn’t take long. You know we made another thirty exabytes last orn? Puts us near the top of the list.” He paused, studying Soundwave. _//Unless... do you think there’s some problem? I mean, since we’ve both been called? Yanno, because of the....//_

The list. It was a measure of Soundwave’s distraction that it took him a nanoklick to link glyph to meaning. The mainframe, the prize being offered as lure to enjoin the small comm stations to greater efficiency. That... could that possibly be all this was? Some check by the communications administration to ensure that the winning station had room for the bulky device? Retro’s involvement was suspicious, but Retro did know the facility well. The mech in Ravage’s view did not look like a petty administrative cog... but then, why would he? Almost every ranking mech in the army was a warframe of some kind or another. Most likely, such assignments were normal. 

_//Soundwave: will assess situation,//_ the carrier replied, twining his glyphs with unworried annoyance, leaving the distinct impression that, at worst, this might simply be a case of one hand not quite aware of what the others were doing. Retro, Soundwave knew, labored under the impression that Soundwave himself was some manner of intelligence operative. Who else had the knowledge to rehack a mech in such a way? Soundwave had done nothing to correct the misconception -- Retro wanted no details, which was well indeed, for Soundwave had none he was willing to give. 

Retro nodded in reply, relieved to rely on a mech who, he believed, outranked him. 

Soundwave carefully clamped down on his internal temperature, drawing a cooling vent as the two mecha passed through another work hall full of busy terminals, down another corridor. Relay, the post commander, turned the corner ahead of them first, anxious greed rippling visibly along his the pathways of his neural net, so strong that Soundwave could taste the rising haze of green-yellow coding. And then....

… then all of Soundwave’s internal reassurances went straight into the slagpit. 

The inspector, the green and gray infiltrator, was thickly hazed with darksome coding, with curling, intertwined and barbed tendrils of _-intent-_ and _-subversion-_ and _-deceit-_. This mech was no innocent inspector, no reassigned petty bureaucrat here to check another item off his list. This infiltrator was here for a reason that had nothing to do with the mainframe, and everything to do with betraying the oaths he had sworn to service and the Lord High Protector--but unlike Retro, he was fully aware of that betrayal. This was no pawn, but a cyberhound on the scent of a mystery of his own. 

And this mech... was more dangerous to Soundwave and Retro both than any cyberhound could ever be. Soundwave saw that too -- could see subthreads calculating hazards, ways out, tallying exactly who might need to be deactivated in the event of failure. Retro topped the list. Those infiltrator protocols evaluated Soundwave as well, neatly identifying weaknesses and killpoints. This was not the comfortable violence of a gladiator, or the wartime instincts that always lurked in the back of every warframe’s -- even a comm officer’s -- processors.

This mech was an assassin, when it suited his purposes.

For the first time, Soundwave fully understood his own inexperience in this game; how his involvement had endangered his cohort. And yet, he couldn’t afford to hesitate. He had to continue as he had begun, and act as if his presence was expected, necessary, masking his trepidation from his field and his faceplates. It helped that each moment that passed gave him more information on the strange mech; his defenses, at least, did not extend to masking his thoughts and intentions from the module’s grasping pull.

Thoughts wafted upward, razor edged and glittering with purpose. The mech was here for Retro. His masters had noticed that this particular puppet was no longer delivering the quality of information he once had, was harder to contact … and they wanted to know why. They, too, feared being discovered, Soundwave realized: a fear the mech before him shared, even embraced, letting the impetus of it carry him, dancing upon its bladed edges. 

It was something his symbionts had understood for thousands of vorn. Ravage, Raindance, and the others had shared their memories of it with him countless times--the thrill of a victory over an unknowing opponent, of shadowed hunts around and against far larger, far more dangerous mecha. Yet only now did Soundwave realize that he could no longer solely be the protector, the solid, immoveable bulwark--not against mecha such as these. He would need to become something far more dangerous; something that could take that double-edged fear and *know* it, wield it.

And Parametric’s module, he knew, would show him the way.

A quick, narrow-banded ping over the cohort channel, and Rumble and Frenzy headed out to do some stealthy sabotage, even as Relay caught sight of Soundwave and Retro, pausing in mid-step. Soundwave watched the gathering twists of indignation and puzzlement, but otherwise gave no indication that he had read the base commander’s gathering ire. “Praefectus Relay,” he said, inclining his helm in acknowledgement of a superior officer. _//Sixth transphasic comm repeater, suffered malfunction. Hard reset, necessary. Base commander, needed to enter necessary command codes.//_

 _//Frag it, Soundwave! The one on the fragging satellite station rooftop? Again?!//_ Annoyance, indignation -- and a shadow-spark of amusement from the infiltrator waiting beside Relay. Soundwave loosened his grip on the module a little more, and found a spill of odd code deep within the slighter mech’s chassis. A comm decoder, not entirely unusual, but a more expensive piece of hardware than carried by most mecha. The chronicler cohort channels, at least, were so specific to his class that it was unlikely Soundwave or his symbionts would be overheard, but Soundwave would probably not be able to direct Retro. 

A decided inconvenience. _//Affirmative, Praefectus.//_ the carrier acknowledged. Accessing that repeater required both a winding drive and an awkward climb, and would keep the commander occupied for half a joor. _//Retro, capable of accompanying inspector.//_

Relay fumed. But he had no other real options -- the station could not afford to let that piece of hardware remain down for several joor. Not if Relay wanted to maintain his lead in the contest rankings. _//Fine. Retro, keep Inspector Spearspring occupied, until I get back. Don’t frag this up, either of you!//_ The praefectus blurted a file of instructions to Retro as he verbally excused himself to the inspector, spoken glyphs dense with apologies. Hesitantly, Retro echoed the file, mostly laden with warnings and directives, to Soundwave. _//And get back to work, Soundwave!//_

The post commander left at a fast walk, and was hardly out of sight when he transformed and raced away.

Soundwave discarded both the order and the file. 

Retro’s uncertain worry was clear in his field; Soundwave forced his own to reflect nothing but interest and curiosity. “Inspector Spearspring: wishes to review data throughput logs?” He’d have more options, Soundwave surmised, if he kept the infiltrator in the busiest parts of the station. 

“I have them already,” said the inspector casually, though annoyance and suspicion flickered through his processors. Soundwave was a complication; the inspector did not want witnesses. Soundwave watched the speculations grow, sending offshoots as processors evaluated possible reasons for the carrier mech’s disobedience. Did Soundwave know something? Or was he simply ambitious, seizing the opportunity to play sycophant to a higher-ranking officer? “Show me where you’re planning to keep this thing. Is it this way? After you.” 

Soundwave revised his plans, sending the members of his cohort scurrying. “Acknowledged,” he said with a moment’s hesitation. The last thing he wanted was to have this mech at his back … but as in so many other things, he didn’t really have a choice.

**********  


The building abutting the comm relay station had been a number of things, over the long course of its existence. Most recently, the vast space had been home to derelicts -- mecha stimmed out, running on fumes, or relegated to the lowest ranks of society simply because of frametype. Most of those, however, had been absorbed into the military industries, and the few that remained had been rousted by the comm station’s encroachment. 

Long ago, during wealthier times, the space had been a distillery, producing ten thousand different types of solvents for a variety of applications and arts. Remnants of that function still remained -- huge lengths of cracked piping chased the walls and ceiling; something still dripped, deep in the tangled ruin of fallen girders and choked-off side passages. And still farther back in history, when Kaon itself had been newly cast, the structure had been part of the forces which moved the city itself. A mercury-hydraulic pumping station, perhaps, or a power link -- old technology, but on a now-unimaginable scale. Of this function, nothing remained; at least not here, in the open central chamber. 

Instead, the comm station’s maintenance mecha had prepared the space for new hardware. A mainframe was huge, requiring electrical and coolant lines, and stable support and shielding. Accordingly, Relay had ordered the assembly of a massive buffered platform, kept steady with antigravs and shock absorbers, generators along the exterior capable of raising a vacuum bubble to keep out particulates and stray cosmic rays. The equipment was creaky and old, but it ran. 

The inspector--Ballistic was his true designation, the module whispered to Soundwave--surveyed the space with critical optics, following along as Soundwave continued the pretense of a tour, leading him from power conduits to the platform itself, pinging him with periodic analysis of how the new mainframe would increase their ability to handle ever-greater data-loads. Soundwave was fully aware that the infiltrator could care less about his statistics or the mainframe Relay was so eager to acquire, but appearances still had to be kept. Far better for this mech to think Soundwave an oblivious functionary, a mech whose only attention was on the petty details of his assigned function and his own personal advancement.

Meanwhile, symbionts slipped through the shadows. Ravage stalked their little group, pacing them, moving from ledge to darkened tunnel on silent pedes; Laserbeak soared on dark wings above the building, and Buzzsaw was a motionless sentinel on a perch high in a disused corner, invisible amongst the tangle of old, disused piping -- all of them watching. Waiting. 

“Your commander must be quite confident of his eventual win to go to all this trouble,” Ballistic observed. The mech’s field was carefully neutral; it was impossible to tell whether he approved of their preparedness or was disgruntled by Relay’s perceived arrogance. 

Retro shifted, uncertain how to answer. “Well, ah--Praefectus Relay wanted to, uhm, ensure we were prepared. For any eventuality, that is. Inspector.” He glanced desperately at Soundwave.

“His confidence, unwarranted?” Soundwave said mildly, turning the verbal knife back on its wielder.

“Hnh. Perhaps not. Your numbers are impressive enough, I’ll grant you that.” The mech opticked the space, strolling forward as if to gauge how best the mainframe might fit on the newly-constructed platform; watching the code twist and trail behind him, however, Soundwave saw the tightening curls of imminent violence, of readied battle-protocols. They were alone--at least as far as Ballistic could scan, the symbionts carefully concealed behind layers of scrap-- and the nearest mecha were preoccupied with their own duties in the main building. This would be Ballistic’s best chance to get the answers he needed from his unwitting spy.

But first, he needed Soundwave out of the way. 

The inspector’s faceplates folded in a frown. “Comm officer Retro, the status of this joist?” 

Retro hurried closer to examine the support which had apparently caught the inspector’s eye. “I... Which one do you--”

Ballistic struck in a whiplash of pure speed, as lethally fast as an oxide shark. A short burst of code, narrow-banded and twined with encryptions, felled Retro between one astrosecond and the next, locking systems offline, bypassing the comm officer’s already-ravaged firewalls. The infiltrator did not wait to see if his lockdown code had worked. He spun towards Soundwave, talons reaching out, sparking with charge even as his other arm transformed into an oddly truncated, fat-barrelled sidegun. He was fast, even for a frontliner, that unremarkable frame obviously modded for speed and stealth, his attack well planned in order to take advantage of a carrier-mech’s weaknesses--

\--assuming, of course, that said carrier had not seen the attack coming. 

Retro crashed down to the metal of the floorplates. Soundwave was already moving, unleashing his hold on the module even as he dodged the scarlet-smoking glyphs that warned him of each _-lunge-_ and _-feint-_ , using Ballistic’s own internal calculations of speed and force against him. Instinct told him to unlimber his primaries, to use them to distract and attack; he ignored them, listening instead to the module, to Ballistic’s own thoughts. The infiltrator knew of carrier mecha, of their relative slowness, their preferred tactics, their vulnerabilities. Soundwave’s datacables and sensory panels had already been well marked as exploitable weaknesses. 

Able to see each blow before it began, Soundwave parried a strike that would have put an electrical bolt through his helm, sidestepped a kick that should have crushed his kneejoint, dodged back from a vicious punch. He never physically saw the jagged pipe behind him, a anticipatory flicker in Ballistic’s cortex his only warning. Soundwave staggered, twisting away from the unseen hazard; and in so doing, was unable to avoid the next strike. Ballistic drove his fist in hard, below Soundwave’s chestplates, knuckle spikes screeching into metal and wiring.

Soundwave managed a glancing blow, fired his sonic cannon -- the concussion blasted dust into the air, made the long-empty piping ring in discordant harmonies, a half-tangible tremor of meaningless *sound* filling the entire chamber. The infiltrator danced away, gone in an astrosecond, pivoting away from the force of the blast. Powerfully limber, he kicked out, slammed Soundwave up against a rough plane of bulkhead.

His cohort stirred, circling. Soundwave could sense Ravage’ stealthy approach, the tensing of his frame as he readied his attack, Laserbeak and Buzzsaw preparing to dive into the fray, to aid their Master. He sent them an imperative negative, absolute and unyielding, _//All: stay back!//_

 _//Master--//_ Ravage growled, gathering himself. _//We cannot let him harm you!//_

 _//Soundwave: capable of handling this.//_ The brief exchange had taken only a spark-flicker, too fast and too tightly-encrypted for Ballistic to intercept. Now Soundwave turned his words into action. Ballistic had closed with him, dentae snarling, talons tearing deep into his armor, armgun at the ready.

That was his first mistake.

Soundwave twisted and lashed out, grabbing that transformed arm. The weapon was already primed, crackling with charge and ready to fire. Ignoring the tearing of Ballistic’s talons against his plating, he forced that arm backwards, using all the strength in his frame, until the infiltrator’s weapon pointed back at his own chassis. 

Ballistic sneered, letting the civilian piece of scrap grapple as he pleased. It gave the assassin the moment he needed to transform his free hand into a long, slender energon blade, readying a killing blow. “Do you think I--?”

Soundwave reached, the module ripping into the weave of the weapon’s systems, of firing codes. He found the one he needed in moments, glowing white hot and ready--and triggered it.

The gun fired. The electrified bolt ripped through Ballistic’s chassis at point-blank range, its charge crackling through internals, crawling over the assassin’s plating, interrupting vital systems. A hoarse screech of pain ripped its way from Ballistic’s vocalizer, the other mech staggering, convulsing under the onslaught. Soundwave hastily kicked the assassin away, stumbling backwards to avoid being caught in the backwash of charge. That bolt should have been enough to incapacitate most mecha, but Ballistic, he now saw, had defenses built into his frame against such an attack, dampers and automatic shunts that diverted the charge away from his most delicate systems, the ones that Soundwave had hoped to cripple. Soundwave’s attack had damaged him--but not enough.

Already the infiltrator was rising, talons curled, shaking off the excess voltage. “Fragging--! Should have kept to your own petty concerns,” Ballistic snarled, circling.

“Traitor Ballistic, should have stayed away from them.” Soundwave dodged aside in that bare astrosecond of hesitation, as the other mech registered Soundwave’s uncanny possession of his true designation _-how could he know why a weapons glitch now what...-_ That moment afforded the carrier time enough to block off pain signals, to reroute power to compensate for his injuries. The dust and small, falling debris was no bar to the module’s telepathy -- which gave him the warning he needed to put a girder between himself and the assassin before Ballistic fired. The charged spike from that strange, flat gun struck hard enough to shake the mech-thick pillar of steel, and the following discharge of electricity numbed the carrier’s plating even at a distance. 

Ballistic snarled and loaded another bolt into firing position, stalking through the billowing clouds of particulate metal... furious now, and for the first time in vorn, afraid.

And then the assassin’s finely-tuned sensors caught upon something, some anomaly of sound in the tangled ruin, a small and well-hidden system.

A symbiont. 

Ballistic knew what symbionts meant to Chroniclers.

The infiltrator began to turn, gun lifting; there was no more time for games. Keeping low for best cover, Soundwave darted out into the open -- just far enough to get a lock on Ballistic -- and *reached.* Nestled in the core of him, the module unfurled as if from sleep, awakening, riding upon every sensor its host possessed, its only need to seek and devour. Thoughts became weapons, gnawing at Soundwave... and ripped into Ballistic, a chaotic and sourceless riptide that pulled him under in an instant. 

Orderly coils of code tore themselves asunder, taken, unwound under the force of Soundwave’s attention. Firewalls, no matter how reinforced and impenetrable, meant nothing -- not against this alien device. Smoke-rising aura of code became ash, became rust, and still the module reached. 

Caught fully in the crosshairs of an impossible hack, the infiltrator screamed. Systems turned upon themselves, tensors trying simultaneously to contract and expand, pumps to both push and pull, processors redlining under cascading errors. 

And then the balance of power, so wildly swinging, turned. The telepathic module, freed of Soundwave’s restrictions for the first time in orn, reached, pulled ... and in its unthinking greed, turned upon its host. 

The device had not disobeyed him for many orn -- but then, Soundwave had never permitted it so much freedom. He’d become... complacent. Vision already hazing with the disordered input of at least five pairs of optics, unable to tell which were even *his*, Soundwave had only moments before his systems were corrupted to the core by that sucking draw. 

Acting out of instinct, the memory of Parametric and his madness flashing through his cortex, Soundwave shut the module down, starving it of its input, cutting off both his and its access to the outside world. He staggered, sensor-blinded and damaged. But he could feel his symbionts’ fear as Ballistic climbed to his pedes. The assassin’s talons closed around a long spear of half-rusted pipe, snapping the length from its fragile moorings. Gasses hissed, some long-forgotten pocket of compounds leaking into the big central chamber. 

“F-fragging... piece of s-scrap--” the crippled infiltrator hissed, whole frame shaking with madness, with a billion cascading glitches. Thousands of vorn of training, banks of carefully crafted coding, all had been upended in an instant -- the assassin would never recover without a full rewrite by a code specialist. Even then, he would never be quite the same mech. In a energon-shot, hating haze, Ballistic focused on the one thing still left to him. 

He would complete his mission. Preferably over Soundwave’s guttered spark. 

On hands and kneejoints, Soundwave fought to impose order on his half-mangled coding, fought to regain control. He had to see, get up, to move -- and with the Quintesson module locked down, he was more helpless than he’d ever been.

**********  


_//Master! Get to cover!//_ Buzzsaw commed over the cohort channel, trying to send Soundwave the rapidly-moving view through his optics, an image of the jumble of fallen plating and supports around him, even as he wheeled, bringing recently upgraded weapons to bear. Not on Ballistic, but on the broken pipe behind him, and the rapidly expanding cloud of gas.

Gas, Ravage’s chemoreceptors informed him, that had been changed by the bolts of electric current through the nearby metal girders, the formerly harmless mixture of free hydrogen and hydrocarbons, roiling and unstable, needing only one more spark ...

... and Soundwave was still sensor-blinded, unable to register his cohort’s warnings, staggering drunkenly as he fought for balance, oblivious to both Ballistic’s approach and the greater danger beyond him. 

_//Boss! Fraggin’ -- to your left!//_ Rumble tried to force the comm through the clamped-down bond with everything he had, Frenzy scrambling out of the tangle of piping beside him on the far side of the building, both of them desperate, terrified. But they were too slow, too far away--they’d never make it in time. 

Ballistic reared back, makeshift spear upraised, the jagged end poised above Soundwave’s backplates. 

Ravage didn’t waste time with warnings. He moved, launching himself forward with every scrap of strength and speed he could muster. Talons dug great gouges in the iron of the flooring as he leaped--and slammed into his Master’s frame, sending the shaky carrier tumbling. Both of them fell, entangled and thrashing, behind a nearby pile of iron girders, Soundwave’s talons clawing upwards in surprise, only to hesitate as haptic sensors belatedly registered the familiar shapes of Ravage’s bladed plating.

_//NOW, Buzzsaw!//_

Soaring high, Buzzsaw fired. The gas ignited, a concussive fireball that ripped outward, searing plating, scorching sensory spines. The explosion blasted slagged shards of metal flying in every direction. Behind their meager shelter, Ravage could not prevent the instinctive flare of pain and panic as sensitive sensory whiskers were burned away, cringing as explosive shrapnel beat against his plating. And then Soundwave was there, between him and the flames, rolling Ravage’s smaller frame beneath him, heedless of his injuries.

 _//Master ... no!//_ Ravage could feel the residual echoes of his carrier’s pain, the slow drip of energon from damaged lines, torn plating. He tried to struggle free, to push Soundwave down; but despite his wounds, Soundwave held fast with a carrier’s strength.

 _//Ravage ...//_ The bladeframe could feel his Master reaching, struggling for coherence, trying to project reassurance.

Then there was nothing at all.


	8. Chapter 8

_//Flipsides!//_

_//W-what’s going on down there?  Everything’s shaking and we heard this horrible boom and then --//_

_//Flipsides,//_ Ravage cut in firmly, even as he crept out from under Soundwave’s weight, twisting carefully so as not to cut his Master on the blades of his body.   _//Can you come swiftly?//_

_//I... I don’t think so.  Everyone’s headed your way -- Relay just went charging by, all mad-looking.  With everyone in the hallway, it might take me a few klicks.//_

Ravage snarled a violent curse.  Soundwave’s plating was glowing-hot, and most of the surfaces near the center of the explosion were partially liquified, cratered with debris.  The whole chamber still trembled, some of Kaon’s great mechanisms flexing like an uneasy giant in the vast layers below the city.  In the room itself, the central pad meant to hold the mainframe had been transformed into a warped tangle and blasted back up against one wall, and the fireball had torn a hole through a large section of the ceiling.  The assassin, caught fully in the backdraft, was little more than a twitching pile of scrap.

 _//Get to a console.  Can you access the external sensor sweeps?//_ Ravage growled, surveying the destruction.  Buzzsaw pinged him a shaky glyph, gliding down on blistered wings towards the cooler end of the room, his plating too thin to long weather this kind of heat.  

 _//Already on it!//_ Ratbat squeaked back, irate.   _//What am I looking for -- oh.  Uhm.  That’s weird.//_  At Ravage’s frustrated snarl, the glideframe hurried on, transmitting the console data.  Outside the comm station, six mecha were folding themselves up from swift, sleek altmodes.  

All of them bore the markings of military inquisitors -- intelligence agents.    

Frag.

Either the battle had tripped alarms -- entirely possible -- or Ballistic had managed to transmit a call for assistance.  The advancing mecha... could be Decepticon allies, or could be Ballistic’s compatriots; both possibilities were equally likely.  

The rest of the cohort, linked into the same channel, saw the feed as well.   _//We’re coming, Ravage--almost there!//_ Rumble commed frantically as he and his brother scrambled around the perimeter of the huge room, flinching from the worst of the heat.   _//We’ll help you get the Boss away--//_

 _//No,//_  Ravage ordered flatly, thinking fast.  Unlike Soundwave, he did not have the hardware to support multi-threaded strategic possibilities, could only plan for a handful of the most likely scenarios at a time.   _//Rumble, Frenzy--stay there.  Stay hidden, but nearby.  Soundwave is badly damaged.  Even if we had the time, we won’t be able to move him without help.//_  Rumble, Frenzy and Flipsides together might have been able to drag Soundwave away, with Ravage’s assistance, but such a tactic would leave an obvious trail, and likely damage their master even more.  And trying to defend their master against all of the oncoming warframes --no.  All that would accomplish would be their deaths.

But they couldn’t just leave Soundwave behind, offline and defenseless.  If the new mecha were also traitors, if they were coming to clean up Ballistic’s mess ... then Ravage needed to ensure that they could not also quietly ‘clean up’ Soundwave as well.  

 _//Flipsides.  Get to a terminal to help Ratbat.  Both of you--use the backdoors Soundwave installed.  Put out emergency calls to the other comm stations, call for medics, fire control, riot police, everything.  Make up additional casualties--or higher-ranking ones--if you need to.  Broadcast Soundwave’s, Retro’s, and Ballistic’s designations.  Especially Ballistic’s.  I want everyone this side of Iacon hearing this and wondering who the frag Ballistic is.//_  His slagged whiskers ached, reduced to blind uselessness; he ignored the null-data, pressing his helm against the cooler plating on the front of Soundwave’s chassis.  Ravage might not be able to defend his master, but he wouldn’t leave his carrier until he had no other choice.  

 _//Send up priority flags for compromised channels--drop the normal traffic, and loop the originations through as many different comm officer stations and high-level authorizations as possible.  I want it to be impossible for anyone to figure out where the frag all this information is coming from.  Lay rumors that the battle was an act of sabotage, if you can.//_  The bigger the mess they could make, the more of an official investigation there would be.  Mecha throughout Kaon would have picked up on that explosion.  An official investigation might not itself save Soundwave, but it would give them time.  Would give Soundwave time.

 _//Laserbeak ...//_  Ravage paused, groping for what else they could do.  He could hear the pounding of distant pedes getting closer, hear the angry and dismayed shouts through the crackle of the flames.  He pushed himself to his pedes, but hesitated, looking down at Soundwave’s darkened visor.  

 _//Go, Ravage,//_ Laserbeak responded, his glyphs showing no signs of the fear and dismay that permeated the rest of the cohort channel.   _//Buzzsaw and I shall keep watch from above.  Wherever they take our master, we will follow.  He will not be alone.//_

\-----

Soundwave sensed his surroundings in starts and flickers.  Systems tried to come online, crashed again under the weight of too much damage, twisted coding struggling to right itself and failing.  But he knew there was shouting, and arguments, knew the familiar buzz of dense comm traffic.  He knew he was being moved.  

When he finally completed a complete--if glitchy--reset sequence, Soundwave found himself flat on his backplates ... and in a cell.

Barely three paces long and wide, the small square of space was scarred and blank, without so much as a berth or cube to sit on.  The walls were gouged, showing silvery streaks left behind by something far stronger than Soundwave’s small talons.  Glowing energy bars cast a malevolent, purplish glow over everything.

Something stirred to Soundwave’s left.  “You awake, Chronicler?”

Soundwave took his time in answering.  He had no other choice; too many systems were running on ad hoc protocols, and piecing the tatters of higher-order functioning back together was... an extensive process.

Soundwave had seen the Quintessons from Ravage’s optics, knew some of the violent history of the species on Cybertron.  But for the first time, he truly grasped to the very spark of him the terror the alien invaders had represented.  The device he’d hosted these past few decaorns, this techno-organic legacy from those slavers, could undo a mech as easy as thought... could undo *him*, with just a few moments inattention.  Neither firewalls nor guardian protocols could touch it, stop it.  It was horror beyond measure.

And it might be his only way out of this.

Soundwave turned his helm.

Retro was caged, like Soundwave, in a featureless cell.  A broad corridor stretched between them, and Soundwave could feel the vibrations of heavy pedes.  Other containment cells lined the walkway and most of them were empty, their bars powered down to save on energon.  One distant cell held a frightened-looking, smallish mech, his plating scored with the distinctive scars of an energon whip.  The sight did not inspire confidence.

“Query: our location?”  Soundwave managed, careful to enunciate each glyph.  

Retro vented harshly.  “Not so loud,” he hissed, keeping his own vocalizer low.  A futile effort, Soundwave thought.  The cells were likely riddled with surveillance devices as well as comm blockers; a million listening audials and watching optics, waiting for either of them to make the slightest slip, the smallest admission of guilt.  “I think this is Green Sector Twelve prison block.  But I’m not sure -- they’ve already moved us once."

Green Sector... was not a good sign.  The Decepticon forces maintained several prison blocks throughout Kaon, ranging from detention brigs meant to hold overcharged brawlers for a few joor to secretive, highly secure facilities.  Green Sector was most definitely of the latter sort.  They rarely transferred comms or data through the Decepticon network, keeping their data close, tightly encrypted and far away from the eyes of low-ranking comm mecha such as themselves.  

“Guards, affiliated with this division?”

Retro blinked.  “Yeah, intel.  Dunno which branch.  Frag, you don’t remember anything?  They stormed in, rounded up the entire station -- by the time I booted up, it was too late to get clear.  Apparently everything was all over the data brokers the astrosecond it happened.  They severed the local network and it was still getting out -- then they ‘jacked my comms.  Yours too, it looked like.”  Retro rubbed the back of his helm.  “Look, you gotta tell them I’m not--”

Massive blast doors rang with a hollow metal boom, grinding ponderously open.  Heavy pedesteps suddenly rang in the corridor, and Retro wisely fell silent.  

Guards flooded in.  They were all battle-hardened warframes, decorated elites rotated out of the front lines for a few orn at a time, their plating scored with the scars as well as the glyphs of their service -- some of the best shocktroops in the Decepticon forces.   In the brief glimpses Soundwave allowed himself, their coding smelled like energon and action, tasted like violence, weave upon weave of strength and competence.  

Soundwave pushed himself upright, bludgeoning his frame into movement as his limbs shook, weakened by his injuries and his damaged code.  He made no attempt to try and push himself to his pedes, but instead propped himself against the back wall of the cell.  Trying to project a facade of strength in the face of such overwhelming odds would be useless.  Better to use his weakness as a cover, to project the harmlessness of a civilian mech in over his helm, while he marshaled his strength and waited for his chance.  Assuming their captors gave him one.

His cohort, at least, was still free.  Their comms might be locked down, but symbiont bonds went far beyond that, resonating on frequencies so close to those of the spark as to be nearly indistinguishable.  He might not be able to communicate, but Soundwave could feel them, all seven sparks still strong and vibrant, feel the faintest undercurrents of their worry, their fear and determination.  Carrier protocols stirred, wanting to reassure, to protect--he ignored them.   Right now, Soundwave had to focus on the threat before him.

The guards lined the hall, stationing themselves at the door and other points with professional precision.  Soundwave found himself reaching for their thoughts, instinctively loosening his hold so he could read deeper, find out their intentions--then, with a harsh vent, locked it back down as he realized what he was doing.

He had become too dependent on *knowing* what his opponents immediately intended, Soundwave realized.  He had begun to treat the module as a crutch, a substitute for his own observations, letting it dictate his stratagems.  He’d been using it as a club, brash and blunt, when what he truly needed was a scalpel, a monomolecular blade that he could slip between a mech’s thoughts without them ever knowing.

The rhythmic thumping of another set of pedes reverberated against the iron walls--heavy, authoritative steps.  The mech came into sight at the end of the block, walking down the warframe-flanked corridor.  He was a warframe as well, Soundwave noted--the reinforced joints, the extra power relays for weaponry were clear enough indicators of that.  The newcomer’s frame might be slightly lighter, leaner than some of the massive grounders that had preceded him, but it was no less lethal in its grace, blue and gold armor both pristine and brutally functional.  Subtle wingflares spoke of a flighted altmode.

The mech stopped before their cells, taking in first Retro, then Soundwave.  “First Decanus Retro.  Decanus Soundwave.  You have a great deal to answer for.”

A useful opening gambit, Soundwave thought.  It left open the nature of their offenses, tacitly encouraged the two of them to proclaim their innocence or their ignorance--and in so doing, potentially reveal far more than they might have intended in the process.  

Retro took the bait.  “I--sir, I don’t know what’s going on!”  He couldn’t quite prevent a nervous flicker of optics towards Soundwave--something that Soundwave was sure this strange mech hadn’t missed.  “I was assigned to guide Inspector Spearspring by Praefectus Relay ... were we ambushed?  Is the Inspector--what happened?  Were we attacked?  Why are we here?”

“... Spearspring.  Interesting.”  The mech shifted his attention to Soundwave.  “And you?  Are you also going to claim ignorance?  After we found you both at the center of this mess?”

Relay had no doubt already informed his superiors that Soundwave had been ordered to return to his post.  There was no legitimate reason for Soundwave to have disregarded those orders.  But even that knowledge didn’t entirely justify the sharpness of this mech’s field, the unblinking focus on Soundwave.  Unless... if this mech knew that Retro had been hacked, then of the two prisoners, Soundwave was the far more interesting one.  The one whose involvement could not be readily explained.

Soundwave couldn’t see any way to deflect those suspicions.  Under the circumstances, proclaiming his innocence would be a waste of time.  And Retro ... he could not risk the other mech’s deactivation.  He still needed Retro intact, as evidence if nothing else.  

Which meant that Soundwave would have to take the brunt of any interrogation.

Soundwave leaned his helm back against the scarred wall, regarding the officer levelly.  

Even a few joor ago, Soundwave might have permitted the telepathic module more power, might have considered digging for the clues he needed, or even hacking this officer outright to create a distraction.  But relying upon brute force had cost Soundwave a great deal already; he dared not pay that price again.  

His visor was cracked at the edges, scorched by the blast, and his battlemask wasn’t much better--but both were still intact.  For the moment, at least, they gave him the imperturbable mask he needed.  Retro already half-believed that Soundwave was an intelligence operative, after all.  All he needed was for this mech to believe it as well, and worry about just to whom Soundwave might have been reporting.

“Soundwave: offlined by the blast.  Cause of explosion, uncertain.”  He waited a nanoklik.  “Also uncertain, purpose behind Spearspring’s inspection.”

The warframe’s optics narrowed a fraction, and the haze of suspicion that chased his processor relays grew thicker.  “Uncertain, Decanus?  What, exactly, do you find uncertain?"

“Inspector’s focus, not on equipment evaluation.”  

“Oh? And this piqued your... curiosity, did it?”

Soundwave said nothing.  Instead he traced the flicker of thoughts and plans across the warframe’s cortex, just observing the ways those swells responded to his words, mapping their progress, their patterns.  Most mecha ran millions of processor functions at any given time, and until now, Soundwave had focused only on the most immediate, the most useful, ignoring the vast majority of those distracting background processes.  

But now, Soundwave needed more than surface thoughts.  And so he watched the background, listened to the ways in which factors and considerations weighed against one another in an endlessly complex and fast-shifting dance.  Following it all, while keeping the module on a tight leash, was daunting.  Becoming proficient in understanding the underlying patterns and layers of other mecha’s thoughts, he realized, would likely take many vorn.  

And yet ... despite the risks the module posed, the damage it had done to him already, and the danger he was in now ... there was a certain thrill in that realization.  He had once been an Archivist, charged with the safekeeping and distribution of Cybertron’s most valuable and highly-prized data.  Now, assuming he managed to survive, and bent the module to his will ... he might yet become an Archivist again: this time, of the secrets of other mecha.  

The warframe _\--Thunderwing-Tribunus-authority--_ turned away dismissively.  “Perhaps I can clarify matters for you, Decanus.  For I am certain that at least one of you is a Senate spy.  No doubt you feared discovery, and when Spearspring found your sabotage....”

“No!” Retro gasped, scrabbling at the charged bars of his cell, only to be thrown backwards again with the sharp tang of scorched plating as the bars repelled his reaching hands.  “That’s not -- neither of us would -- please!  You have to believe me!  I don’t know what happened, one astrosecond I was looking at something on a strut and the next I....”

Soundwave said nothing.

Thunderwing waited, silent and grim, as Retro babbled his innocence.  The comm officer’s protests were predictable, expected.  Soundwave, however... the carrier had given him just enough information to imply a plausible reason for his presence, and now?  Nothing.  Sharpening his attention to a fine point, Soundwave nudged at the coils of _-irritation/impatience-_ deep within Thunderwing’s processors, watched them began to lace their way through the steely lines of expectation, disrupting the weave of _-authority/submission-_ and _-projected scenarios-_. The module fought his control, more accustomed and better suited to rending/taking than to this careful editing, but Soundwave permitted it no leeway.

And as those undercurrents of frustration gained ground, some of the uneasiness in the Tribunus’s field made more sense, nudged deeper thoughts to the fore.  Thunderwing, it seemed, disliked the thought that he was being jerked around by a pissant little operative.  Soundwave could use that.

“Enough!” the Tribunus snarled.  Retro broke off with an abortive squawk of his vocalizer. “Understand this--no one is coming to rescue you.  It does not matter who your commander was.  It does not matter who or what you think you know.  In this place, *I* am the only authority.”  Thunderwing’s field reflected power, his anger, and his strong leadership -- the latter held forth as an almost tangible lure, as bait.  It made Soundwave wonder.  Did intelligence operatives typically switch masters so easily?  It seemed an odd gambit, given the likely consequences of such disloyalty -- and why make such an offer so early in an interrogation?  Soundwave nudged at that irritation a little harder.  

Ah, there.  Beneath that electromagnetic field, other threads were running, mere shadows in the haze of other coding.  They were subtle things, frantic flickers, there and gone.  But buried deep, there was fear under the Tribunus’s veneer, muffled glimpses of   _-terror no time desperation everything revealed-_

Thunderwing knew of this spy network, then, and feared that Soundwave knew its extent -- that much was easy enough to put together.  But there was more to it than that, deeper, more urgent fears.  Carefully, one sliver at a time, Soundwave drifted farther into the flux of coding -- even as Retro again picked up the thread of his pleas, protesting his innocence, telling the tale of their meeting with the would-be Inspector Spearspring.  

Thunderwing continued his questioning; probing for tells, for weaknesses or chinks in their armor, for information.  Still watching, still listening, Soundwave gave him nothing to work with, responding not at all to threats and persuasions alike.  Thunderwing’s verbal interrogation was both repetitive and inventive, and laced with traps for the unwary ... but it was difficult to trap your prey when they refused to take the bait.  

And all the while, Soundwave gathered his data, learning the patterns of this mech’s thoughts, tracing the ebb and flow of data in a way that no other mech could.  As Thunderwing grew angrier and more frustrated, Soundwave’s access only expanded.  There was more to this than mere spies -- more secrets tucked away in the corners of the Tribunus’s processors, locked down and hidden even from code specialists, Soundwave was certain of it.  

Finally, after threatening Retro also failed to provoke a response from Soundwave, the warframe reached the limits of his patience. Snarling, Thunderwing palmed the cell’s controls.  The bars flickered offline, and Soundwave tensed.  

He had run out of time.

“Get him up.  I want answers from this underclocked piece of scrap.” The tribune ordered, and turned a malevolent crimson glare on Soundwave.  “And since you’re obviously not inclined to cooperate with this investigation, you leave us with little choice.  Your silence will serve you nothing in the end, Chronicler--we will have the answers we want, even if we have to pull them, bit by ragged bit, from the pathetic remnants of your cortex.”

Guards reached for Soundwave, hauled him roughly to his pedes, their strength outclassing his effortlessly.  Even if Soundwave had been in full possession of his faculties, he doubted he would have been able to struggle free.  They dragged him out, unresisting; the Tribunus snarled and turned away, leaving Soundwave with, ultimately, no real answers at all.

He had been so close....

“Thunderwing.”  Soundwave made no effort to modulate his monotone.  Instead he let the flatness of his vocalizer lend impact to the two simple words he needed.  

_“We know.”_

Taunting a mech like this was more than stupid--it was suicidal.  But those words were also the key to bring the tribunus’s fears to the fore, out where they could be seen, could be plainly read.  And in that moment... Soundwave saw *everything,* writ in code as bright and bold as graffiti burned in silver upon a corroded wall.  

And what he saw left him stunned, beyond words.  

The Tribunus sneered.  “Take him away.  Tell Variance to start taking them both apart  ... and summon Bombshell.”

\-----

  


Time slowed to crawl. Astroseconds became kliks, kliks became joor, and the joors themselves stretched on until they too became meaningless.  Until time became nothing but the bare spaces between sparkbeats, those brief incandescent moments of relief between the searing spikes of agony that wracked his frame.  Pain jolted through his protoform, his cortex, as he was peeled open, laid bare, and the cold, analytical thoughts of his tormentors provided little respite.  

Soundwave had done what he could to influence individual mental threads, to alter his interrogators’ assumptions, before pain stripped his control and his ability to process sensory input.  Subtly, carefully, he’d kept them confident and focused on Soundwave, made then believe they’d found more and better information than they had, kept them from calling for the aid of better hackers, other coding specialists.  Bombshell, the mech that had hacked Retro and corrupted his code, would be dangerous enough, once he arrived from his distant post.  Until then, Soundwave could not afford to allow his firewalls to be breached.  

Soundwave had his own secrets to conceal.  

He’d done well.  But it was only a matter of time before Soundwave’s efforts failed, before Thunderwing’s periodic demands for information overrode Soundwave’s crafted influence.  Pain and exhaustion both had taken their toll.  He had managed, somehow, to delay the inevitable for joors -- had kept the interrogators talking amongst themselves, kept them satisfied with shockprods and words that Soundwave didn’t even bother to process -- but his influence wouldn’t last forever.  And once a true code specialist was summoned to hack his defenses, tear down his datawalls ... Soundwave would have only two choices left.  Either unleash the module completely, and in the process, twist himself into a monstrous mockery of himself... or allow himself to be torn apart at the hands of Retro’s hacker.  

Then something had changed.  Dimly, through damaged audials, he could hear distorted, attenuated noise, could feel vibrations as they jarred exposed internals ... some kind of pounding?  He tried to fight past the cascade of damage reports, of redlined self-repair protocols that had overwhelmed his primary processing threads with their demands.  How long had it been?  It took a monumental effort to think, to do even a simple time-check ... the room was empty and according to his chronometer, his chassis hadn’t been touched in ...  twelve-point-two klicks.  Which meant he might live twelve-point-two klicks longer.  Or it might also mean that Bombshell had arrived.

A thread drifted up, reminding him that he really should check the wingtip which Ratbat had frayed on a comm terminal, make sure the repair was.... Soundwave killed the process.  It was getting more difficult to keep his processors from wandering.

Talons closed around the bindings that secured Soundwave.  Sensing deception, the carrier tried to twist away, preparing himself to reach for the cortex of his assailant.  

“Easy there, big guy.  New orders.  We’re getting you out.”  The words warbled oddly, distorted and interrupted by washes of static as audial receptors shorted, tried to reroute.

The forcechains clicked free.  His hands freed, Soundwave lashed out, blind, desperate.  He had to get out!  Had to get free to tell to protect to guard--!

His fist was caught, talons went to the locks over his medical ports.  “Frag, hold him down.  We need to--”  

Something was wrong with Soundwave’s sense of time -- he was slower than he’d anticipated, the hacker -- it had to be -- far faster.  Soundwave writhed as the code specialist jacked in, fighting to the end.  

The blackness swallowed him.

  


\-----

  


Gradually, Soundwave became aware of movement, of voices in the darkness.

Something tugged at his battered side, replacing a length of tubing, feeding it into a reservoir of energon.  Foreign code cycled up his emergency pumps, and sweet warmth began to filter through his frame, pushing back the encroaching cold.  

“...extensive... going to need a... slagit, just had--”

Relays tingled as they were spliced back together, senses sharpening a fraction.  Pain was a distant thing, walled away -- medical code?  His links to his symbionts were intact, but attenuated, his cohort at a distance.  Which wasn’t right.  He had, he needed....

“You want to be the one to tell the Lord High Protector he’s gotta wait?  Get him ready.  Two joor.”

Someone bit off a vicious string of oaths, and the darkness caved in upon him once more.  

\-----

Bootup was sudden and hard.  Medical blocks tattered, fell away, leaving a raw ache behind -- everything hurt.  A cascade of new hardware reported in; a multitude of pieces had been repaired or replaced entirely.  They were all pre-incubated and in good condition, but incorporating so many repairs at once... was clearly going to take longer than Soundwave had been allowed.

Or was going to be allowed, to judge by the talons now heaving him to his pedes.  The carrier stumbled, would have fallen -- only to be hauled upright again by a warframe to either side.  “Move it,” growled one, shoving his blocky shoulder under Soundwave’s side, both for support and speed.  A hatch hissed open.

The prison was gone, along with the chains, the shock prods.  Rebooting optics focussed on clean metal, scuffed decking, some mech’s pede, the foot of a medical sling-berth.  Then he was stumbling out, into a hallway that seemed too dark, requiring another hard reset of the optics.  

What... where was he?  Why was he alive?  Mecha pushed by to either side, hurrying past as Soundwave regained control of his hardware, forcing tensors and hydraulics to respond, until he could walk between his escorts, rather than being partly dragged.  His frame had been repaired, yes... but hurriedly, and his coding had not been touched, still bore markers of the damage the module had inflicted.  Impossible to know how much damage, exactly how compromised Soundwave might be.  He needed Ravage, needed Laserbeak, needed time and peace to check his own coding....

His symbionts were alive, all of them, and that was a jolt of relief, but they were outside natural comm range, and the secured network here... simply refused him, demanded encryptions and clearances he did not possess.  His attempts at communications were logged, monitored, nothing was relayed properly.  Where *was* he?  Had he escaped? Been captured?  Or had he been hacked, and now --?

His guides pushed Soundwave back, up against a solid bulkhead, and the corridor was suddenly full of troops -- an entire platoon of armed and branded warframes, moving fast.  Soundwave straightened, drew a careful ventilation.  He needed more information.  Steadying himself, Soundwave gradually loosened the blocks he’d built up around the telepathic module.  

Hungry but tightly restrained, it reached out, and now Soundwave could see the code rising up like smoke from a hundred processors, could smell and taste the violent intent coiling behind a thousand readied weapons.  

Soundwave’s guards were just as hurried, impatient about the delay, calculating routes that would take them around this troop movement with the least time wasted.  One of them slanted Soundwave a sidelong glance.   _-right left corridor what about citadel access B? no, had some kinda scrap stored in that hall last orn frag He’s not gonna be happy don’t envy this poor civvie at all seriously wouldn’t want to be in his pedes for one of them ‘conferences’ Scattershot said it took the medics two orns to put the last bot back together-_

The Citadel.  Soundwave stiffened.  Mecha had taken to calling Lord Megatron’s center of operations by that glyph.  The Citadel was carved from the ruins of one of the Towers the Lord High Protector had demolished -- which was perhaps why every part of this place looked so brutally functional, the halls and flooring beneath their pedes assembled from simple, durable industrial panels and not yet well-worn.  And the mech who’d demanded Soundwave’s prompt presence, whose anger had left such a lasting imprint....

He could kill them all, Soundwave realized.  It was a revelation, a thought as clear as a lightning strike, cutting through his confused haze.  The two guards, the warriors striding by, the mecha no doubt plotting against him in other rooms -- he could reach out, could trap those spinning sparks in a cage of coding.  He could crush them with a thought, stride unopposed from this labyrinth, find his symbionts....

His cohort.  They were not far ... he could feel them, precious and determined and *his*.  They could well be here, someplace, either captured or attempting to infiltrate the complex.  A building like this, with so many mecha coming and going, and so many ruins in which to hide, could never be fully secured against symbionts.  He dared not risk them.  

One of his guards, a stocky warframe, vented in relief as the last of the unit of fighters passed by.  “Come on, civvie.”  Talons wrapped around Soundwave’s upper arm, the guards hauled Soundwave away from the wall, hurrying down the corridor once more.  

The walls in this part of the citadel were thicker than normal, reinforced against bombardment or inadvertent weapons fire.  There were mecha behind the hatches he passed, vaguely hazed drifts of coding -- but more than that, Soundwave could not tell for certain.  The mecha streaming past him in the hallway, however, were ample sources of information.  The processors of some were clouded with dull greenish boredom; others were laced with the hot blue-white of importantreports/skirmishdata, cloaked in disappointment or triumph, or simply trailed selfimportance/pride as they pushed their way past.  

They were heading up, Soundwave vaguely realized.  Up a long ramp, across a bridge hanging between buildings -- affording a momentary glimpse of jagged ruins and the distant lights of Kaon -- and then they turned a corner.  The mecha in the hallway here were crowded thickly, processor threads smoking with the red-pink of battle lust, sheer white exultant excitement, a muted orange of trepidation.  

A roar echoed down the corridor.  Was the sound real?  Perhaps it was simple an artifact of his disorientation, the audible afterimage of too many cacophonous inputs.  A massive hatch rumbled opened before them, and inside ....

The room was a sunken sparring dojo, the largest he had ever seen.  Two dozen mecha lined the knee-high barrier around the perimeter, avidly watching; the center was thirty mechanometers square, floored in metalmesh matting to somewhat cushion blows.

And there, a desperate, battered grounder faced off against the sun.  

It wasn’t ... Soundwave couldn't even ... it was a mech, and yet it was so much more, with every line of its coding as brilliant as the aura of a newborn spark. The code rose up in a towering inferno, a coruscating sunrise, lancing outward, every thought, every gesture incisive and charged with intent.   Every line of it was writ in crystalline glyphs for which Soundwave had no name, but that harmonized at the core of him all the same.

So beautiful.  And... holy, each line pinned by a signature that locked the architecture into resonances beyond mere metal.  

Primus.  Primus.  Primus.

At his sides, the guards pushed Soundwave forward, into the room.

Dimly, his audials registered words, recognized the imperative tones.  Commands, perhaps.  It was impossible to know for sure, not when it all dissolved into a crackling white noise, rendered insignificant against the towering magnificence that beat against his senses.  It made him want to cover his optics, his audials, before those glyphs could scour him from the inside out, before the module could reach out and devour and be burned alive.  The sun turned its full attention upon Soundwave; the grounder warframe bowed and scuttled away in relief, a merest nothing in the aura of this conflagration.

Perhaps Soundwave had been hacked after all; perhaps this was the Well.  This -- was this *real*?  He swayed.  Took a step backwards.  This was ... it was too much, and he--

More words.  A short, sharp barked command, a rising roar of violent, eager noise at his backplates, and then he was falling, launched forward by a rough shove, stumbling over the ledge and into the ring.


	9. Chapter 9

Soundwave hit the ground in a frame-rattling, awkward sprawl. Talons pressed against a yielding surface; working on instinct, the carrier pushed himself upward. He could feel the press of that burning inferno, the weight of expectation and violence drawing him in. He was on his pedes, somehow ... facing the light, blinded by it. He lifted his helm, trying to see the shape of the mech beyond, and could trace only sharp edges, a solar storm made manifest in metal--

And then the mech *moved*, potentialities coalescing into action. _-Violence-_ twined with unimaginable _-strength-_ and _-speed-_ , twisting together in efficient, brutal curling equations as a blade scythed towards Soundwave’s midsection. There was no time to think, to plan, to plead for mercy. Only to move without processing, pivoting away from a lightning-swift stab, falling inwards as if that radiance were a force of gravity, towards talons that slashed at faceplates, twisting away bare microns from contact. 

Stepping, sliding--lunge and parry, point and counterpoint, the burning sun before him, Soundwave a ragged shadow wheeling behind, darting in, ducking low. Transcendance roiled in lazy coils around them both, a lethal beauty composed of _-intent-_ and movement and nothing more. And yet, the speed of it -- it was like trying to dodge a whirlwind, Soundwave forcing every micron of his stolid, inflexible frame to their limits just to keep up, to keep splintering strikes from landing with full force. 

Even with the module’s guidance, glancing blows cast him aside, driving him down on buckling kneejoints. Recovering in time to avoid the next strike took everything Soundwave had, and still his opponent demanded more, ever faster, ever stronger. Guided by the fundamental dictates of the code around him, Soundwave parried with all the strength he could muster, attacked when he could, a flurry of heavy blows that did little in the way of damage. Talons struck out, leaving deep scores in the heavy armor of Soundwave’s chestplates. 

And all the while, the inferno burned, the press of that unseen gaze searing past scars and battered armor, to his very spark. 

It was ... a dance, in a way. A testing, twisting, violent game upon the razor’s edge, ducking underneath ferocious blows as the module whispered to him of _-death-_ and _-flight-_ and _-Primus-_ , talons reaching out, daring to touch, to reach for just a fragment of that glory....

-the crowd around them drew a harsh collective inhalation-

... and he was caught, his arm pinned, his frame twisted and lifted and falling through an infinite space. Dimly, Soundwave felt the impact of his frame against the ground, the reverberations echoing inside his helm, his optics wide and blind behind cracked visor. Too much ... it was too much, as if he touched the very Allspark itself, his optics seared by colors that did not exist. He would extinguish, would be remade, and Soundwave waited patiently for that final stroke. 

It did not come. Instead, there were ... words? His name, spoken in a Voice like the judgment of Primus, a rumble he could feel through the flooring.

“Soundwave. Still helm-deep in trouble, I see. Is this a particular aptitude of yours, or merely abysmal fortune?”

“... current hypothesis: the former.” At least if the events of the last orn were any indication. The tip of a coruscating lance of sacred code just touched the armor over his spark. For a fleeting, eternal clockcycle, he felt... consumed with the compulsion to bare his core to that purifying fire. 

“An interesting talent. And one that, it seems, has embroiled you in a web of spies and traitors. A pity you did not see fit to inform your superiors of this,” the Voice mused, contemplative. The point of that white-flaming code scraped against his armor. A blade, Soundwave realized suddenly. His symbionts -- the revelation of how close he was to deactivation, to leaving them bereft and vulnerable, shocked him, and Soundwave clamped down on the telepathic module, starving it of power one fraction at a time. 

It was not a simple task. He could have spent aeons in this unspeakable presence -- megavorns just tracing these spiking resonances, this primordial code. The lines seemed almost like hymns as they faded, prayers, canticles in praise of... perhaps a kind of continuous destructive genesis, the engine of change itself. Soundwave shook his helm, just a little, trying to separate that radiance from the mech standing over him. “Words alone: empty, meaningless. Soundwave: required more evidence to bring before the Lord High Protector.”

“Perhaps you have not heard.” The Voice was heavy with irony. “That is no longer a title I may claim. Up.” The pressure on his chestplates vanished, the code drawing away. Soundwave mourned the absence. But the command of that last glyph was unmistakable. 

“Sparkright abides, immutable: subject to neither claim nor disclaimer,” Soundwave said, plucking a quote from his memory banks as he pushed himself to his pedes. The glyphs were old, the cadence strange in his vocalizer, but what other response could he make? The function instilled in a spark did not wither, did not fade at the command of other mecha. 

“High Protector Adamant, second era,” the Voice noted, dryly attributing the reference. And then Soundwave scrambled to dodge back and away from a deceptively lazy swipe of talons -- an effortlessly smooth sequence that, as Soundwave tried to take a stance to counterstrike, somehow became a pivot, a turn, the thump of a heavy elbow planted squarely at the center of his backplates. The blow flung Soundwave forward; only long and deep-coded practice at the Arena kept him from sprawling flat on his faceplates. He tumbled, using that momentum and rolling back onto his pedes, ignoring overstressed systems as they sent painful damage-indicators spiking into his battle protocols. 

Soundwave turned.

The haze of too-recent damage, of the module’s influence, momentarily cleared. He was in a ring, he realized, surrounded by wide-opticked and silent warframes. 

In a ring--and facing Lord Megatron. 

The Lord High Protector. Brother-spark to the Prime, the military fulcrum of the Empire. The most powerful single warframe ever created ... was watching him, visage and massive dyad field inscrutable. Megatron flicked a droplet of energon from the tip of his blade. “Even if I am to believe that you do not count among them, historian, the traitors embedded in my army still pose me a dilemma.”

Megatron prowled forward, stalking Soundwave, the warframe’s mass impeccably balanced. Traces of fiery, transcendent code still shrouded the edges of his plating, tugged at the corners of Soundwave’s processors. 

Soundwave went still, unable to draw even a ventilation as awe intermingled with terror, conspiring to freeze his systems. “Observation, not all are traitors,” someone commented. Soundwave realized all too late that it was him.

“Explain,” growled Megatron, and the next blow came out of nowhere.

Vorn of arena experience came to the fore; Soundwave ducked forward, turning into the blow. Retreating would only give the warframe before him more chances to use his greater reach; closing with Lord Megatron, as insane as it seemed, at least gave him a chance to diffuse the power behind that bladed fist. Not that it changed the outcome overmuch as Soundwave staggered, was knocked reeling again by a wickedly hooked punch. Another flurry of strikes, swift as a razorsnake--Soundwave scrambled, dodged, tried to deflect those talons onto the thickest portions of his armor. 

“Spy network, propagated by highly placed traitors,” he said desperately, forcing the words--his only weapons, as feeble as they might be--in between the strikes. The carrier spun with the next blow, trying to use his lighter frame to get under Megatron’s guard, to overcome strength with agility. “Many of these spies, unwitting victims of traitorous commanders. Their processors, violated.” Darting, Soundwave parried away a spiked fist with a powerful, practiced pivot, lunged closer -- “Their loyalty: betrayed.” -- and drove his fist into a gap in Megatron’s armor between two flankplates.

Or tried to. That opening Soundwave had spotted closed just as suddenly, the Lord High Protector coming around impossibly fast, and Soundwave’s fist slammed into the center of Megatron’s palm. It was like punching a bulkhead. Bladed talons closed over his fist.

Megatron’s fanged dentae were bared in a ferocious snarl, optics smoldering. “So you say.” And only then did Soundwave realize the trap he had fallen for, the apparently exploitable gap left tantalizingly open for an unwary attacker. “Did these traitors come crawling to you, Soundwave? And you believed their whimpering rationalizations?” Those talons tightened; Soundwave could feel the plating over his knuckles creak as it compressed, pinching the joints. The sheer strength in that grip was monstrous, for all that it was carefully controlled -- Soundwave knew in an instant that he could lose his arm like this, that Megatron could rend the limb from his chassis as easily as venting. He had to answer. 

“Belief, unnecessary. Soundwave-” A brutal sweep cut his legs out from underneath him, sent him crashing onto his backplates. Soundwave fell, unable to roll to break the impact--and with his talons caught in that inexorable grip, could not regain his pedes. Not unless Megatron allowed it. “Soundwave: verified all data. Soundwave: *saw* it.”

“So you would have me spare the lives of weaklings, then, rather than those of traitors?”

“Negative.” That grip tightened--had Soundwave gone too far? One did not order the Lord High Protector to do anything. Not unless you were a Prime. Yet Lord Megatron had asked the question. Soundwave could do little but give him the truth.

“Retro’s cooperation, ensured misinformation given to the Senate.” Soundwave looked upward, into those scarlet optics, the fiery curls of code that wafted like the smoke of burnt offerings. The sacred glyphs were so strong, layered so deep, that any relaxation of the module’s power throttles left them vivid, a fiery haze. Soundwave wondered if some of his processors had been jarred loose; it was difficult to even think around the press of that field. He focused as best he was able. “Continued misdirection, potentially useful. Weaknesses: can become leverage, given opportunity. Lord Megatron, knows his warframes well. Query: probable outcome, if hacked warframes are freed of their chains?” 

“Hn.” Death and war were in that code, the destruction that brought order, that cut old patterns apart so that they might be reforged. “And what of the puppetmasters? Would you beg for their sparks, as well?”

What correct answer could there be to a question like that? Kill them, and Megatron risked losing the information they harbored. If he spared them, however, he weakened his authority. As far as Soundwave was concerned, traitors--those mecha who had deliberately and knowingly betrayed all oaths they might have taken to the Lord Protector and to Cybertron--did not deserve the mercy of being allowed to draw another ventilation. But it was not for him to say. “Soundwave: offers only a suggestion. Prior to your judgement, interrogate traitors on the nature of Senate’s new dyad.”

Silence. That field flared, a vast, swelling heave of violence, and Soundwave could no more have stopped it swamping his senses than he could have summoned a sun to rise over Cybertron. Was this how it all ended?

“Explain,” Megatron snarled, and Soundwave could hear his joints grating in that implacable grip. 

“Tribunus Thunderwing, driven to rage; revealed more to this plot.” Soundwave shook his helm, regretting opportunities lost. If he just had been given more time, space in which to probe and twist at that cortex and the energy to do so... but he hadn’t, had obtained only an outline, damning though it was. “Soundwave: knows only that dyad-creation, secretly authorized by Prime-edict and Senate. Spy network, helped to ensure our ignorance.”

“Optimus would not ... no. Of course he would, that self-sacrificing fool.” Murder was in that Presence now, as well. The world had become a towering, coruscating rage, so vast that Soundwave would be consumed by it, his frame torn apart to appease some negligible fraction of it. He knew it, could feel it. 

The Lord High Protector held his effortless grip a moment longer... and then relaxed his hold, leaving all of Soundwave’s lower arm numb but still whole, armor-piercing talons curling beneath shorter, blunter claws in invitation. 

Watching those pale talons flex, the code crawling them in a shimmering haze, Soundwave forced his own trembling fingers to respond, to clasp, scuffed cobalt folding against gunmetal white. He was struck by the sudden feeling that he had seen this before, though he could not now say when or where. 

A smoldering crimson gaze studied Soundwave -- and then the Lord High Protector hauled him effortlessly to his pedes, steadied Soundwave when he might have fallen. “We have, then, a great deal to do. And it seems the forces have an opening for a tribunus. Demolishor--” the focus of that deadly attention changed, scarlet optics turning away, and Soundwave knew nothing but regret. “--see Soundwave settled.”

And then the sun was gone, that fractaled labyrinth of crystalline coding moving away. Someone thundered out orders, words that had the snap of unmistakable commands -- but Soundwave’s tensors could not respond fast enough to obey, would not even respond to let him follow in the wake that surpassing brilliance. It was all he could do to stay upright in the face of his exhaustion, his capacitors so drained they ached. Along with every other part of him, to be honest. Around the ring, mecha were moving, the ring of onlookers dissolved into a dizzying flurry of of action. 

What -- what exactly had just happened? 

Someone spoke his name. For a moment, he didn’t recognize it, the glyph echoing strangely, devoid of a dyad’s immeasurable power. The padding underpede shook as a massive mech approached. Chassis-crushing talons reached for him. 

His symbionts, that sacred code -- if he extinguished now, he would never--! Soundwave struck out against that reaching grasp, tried to dodge around it, tensors failing.

“Easy there, Chronicler.” Talons caught at him before Soundwave ended up flat on his faceplates again. “Hold up. You gotta walk this off, trust me. Come on, this way.”

The tankframe gripped him, subtly taking most of his weight, and Soundwave had little choice but to walk, pedes responding sluggishly to his commands. He had somehow consumed charge even faster than his structures could process the energon left in his tanks, an explosive kind of energy consumption that should have been impossible for a stolid frametype like his. A hatch slid open, and they were in a hallway. Other mecha moved around them, giving Demolishor the wide berth that his frame and his rank demanded. 

A hallway, Decepticon high command. _Demolishor._ Former gladiator, now a high-ranking Decepticon legionary. Soundwave focused on making sense of his surroundings, on keeping his pedes from stumbling.

The dux had changed a great deal from the last time Soundwave had seen him. All of Demolishor’s armor matched, for one thing. His topcoat was clean, the orange fiery-bright, no longer a dull shade to disguise traces of rust. He moved differently, with pride and great certainty. The mech had once been an ally of sorts, a good trainer, and a useful and remarkably loyal implement in Soundwave’s plans. 

Those plans, of course, were little more than rust and scrap now.

“Chronicler-- what the Pit happened in there?” Demolishor asked at last, when the hallway seemed reasonably clear.

Exhausted beyond anything he could recollect, Soundwave endeavored to piece together a coherent reply. In the past orn, Soundwave had finished half a workshift, disassembled the cortex of an assassin, and been savaged on a code-deep level by his own module. Then he had been caught squarely in a fiery explosion, imprisoned and tortured, expertly but hastily repaired, and finally had been tossed into a sparring ring to fight for his life against the Lord High Protector of all of Cybertron. Who had thoroughly dented Soundwave... but let him live. For the moment. “Soundwave, uncertain. Lord Megatron--” he fell silent.

Demolishor snorted. “Yeah, been in your treads. I felt a lot like that, after my first interview with Himself.”

“Int--!” Soundwave managed to cut off his vocalizer before it could break on an embarrassing squawk. He tried again. “Query: nature of this ... interview?”

The massive tankframe shrugged. “Interview, assessment, conference. Whatever you want to call it. I think he can tell most anything about a mech just by the way you fight, how you handle yourself. He went real easy on you at first, ‘cause you’re a civvie and he knew you were banged up. But I gotta tell you, that thing you did, the way you moved-- ain’t never seen you do that before.” Demolishor shook his heavy-plated helm.

Soundwave stared at him blankly. That had been ‘easy’?

“Slag, mech. You don’t --?” The massive warframe studied Soundwave intently, coming to a halt in the corridor. Then he shrugged... and pressed his palm flat to Soundwave’s chestplates, talons spread directly over the spark, where the field was thickest.

It was a measure of Soundwave’s core-deep exhaustion that he couldn’t determine if he should flinch away, or if doing so would betray some manner of weakness. The gesture was bizarre in this context -- too familiar by half, too *dangerous* by far, given the weaponry a warframe carried in his arms and hands. Passing mecha slanted them odd looks. 

“You got in the ring, dodged him like a frontliner -- and then you just kinda ... got under his guard, reached out. Touched him.” Demolishor withdrew his hand. “Not sure what you thought you were doing, but you definitely got his attention.” Demolishor huffed a laugh, nudged him into movement again. “Other than that, really good work, by the way.” 

Soundwave wracked his processors. It didn’t... didn’t sound as if Demolishor had been ordered to dispose of Soundwave? But then, what had Lord Megatron meant by ‘settled’? He needed to think, needed to plan... he was having trouble placing one pede in front of the other. “Soundwave, did not--” he had hardly landed a blow, certainly not enough to more than momentarily stagger the Lord High Protector. If that had been a sparring match, the victor was clear.

“What, win? Mech, I think if someone forced Lord Megatron to yield, he’d be elevated to lieutenant on the spot. Pretty sure the big guy had me on my backplates earlier than he had you. That was damn fine for anyone, let alone a civvie.” Soundwave had a few moments to attempt to process that. He’d observed warframes for many vorn in the arena, knew the great stock they placed in individual combat, but this? 

“Anyway, you better rest up.” Demolishor stopped them before a closed hatch. “You’re gonna want to take the sigil before you take control of your division, and definitely before Lord Megatron wants to see your report. Mecha elevated to tribunus usually already have it.” The former gladiator studied him for a moment, optics lingering on the deep rents left by the Lord Protector, layered over injuries only slightly older. _//Primus. Here’s my private comm line -- call me when you have questions. I’m off rotation for the next two orns. Get some recharge; I’ll schedule a medic to come look at you, see if we can get your gear and weapons back from the prison. Err, weapon.//_

Tribunus? Division? Soundwave caught at the private comm codes. _//Demolishor: rescued... called for--?//_

The warframe shook his helm. “‘Fraid not. Didn’t know anything about what you were up to, before I got the comm. I suspect, though, that you’ve got this guy to thank for saving your aft. He’s been shepherding yer little technimals around.” Demolishor signaled the hatch.

The door slid open on spartan quarters, roomy for one officer, now crowded with symbionts. His symbionts, *his*, all of them, their bright sparks calling him home, rising up to their pedes, wide optics turning... 

...and all of them clustered around another carrier.

Black rage flooded him, sheer murderous fury bringing carrier protocols to the fore in a hot rush. Primaries slid free, barbs and blades folding outwards. As the other mech jerked to his pedes, Soundwave threw himself forward, blinded by protective imperatives--

\--only to be brought up short by hard hands on his pauldrons, talons denting inward, holding him back with a tankframe’s immoveable strength. “--ndwave, stop! Fragging Chroniclers--hold on, this isn’t, he didn’t--” 

The words were meaningless sounds, washing over him. Soundwave spared no thought as to what he risked with his newly-repaired injuries and drained systems. This carrier DARED--!

And then his symbionts were there, rushing forward, abandoning the other carrier without a backward glance, the cohort channel flowering open, overflowing with relief and welcome. _//-Boss boss Master Boss Soundwave you’re okay how bad are you hurt we could feel you hurting what did they do did you take ‘em down you’re here we saved ya so many mecha we found him we told him where they took you-//_ Small hands and talons patted at his legs, tails twined around his arms, and Soundwave’s legs folded underneath him, kneeplates hitting the floor with an undignified clang. The other carrier was forgotten as Soundwave reached out, gathered the mechkin close, letting Laserbeak and Buzzsaw and Ratbat jostle for perches on pauldrons and gauntlets, checking with optics and cohort-bonds both for damage, as well as for any signs that his right as carrier had been usurped. Ravage prowled forward, pressing himself hard against his master’s side, bladed tail curling around the bigger mech. _//Ravage ...//_ Soundwave said, making the name an exhalation of pure relief. _//All of you ... safe? Unhurt? How ...//_

“I see you survived,” said the other carrier dryly. He kept a careful distance, as much as the quarters allowed, a foxframe and scaleframe clustered at his pedes and a serpentframe twined comfortably about one gauntleted arm. Archived memory fought its way to the fore, past Soundwave’s relief. 

_“Amplitude?”_ The other carrier was very different from how Soundwave remembered him, his plating unmarred, gleaming green and gold. He had incorporated heavier armor on his limbs, Soundwave noted, and the purple insignia the Decepticons had adopted as their own--the Lord Protector’s sigil--was emblazoned on one pauldron, openly proclaiming his allegiance. But underneath it all, the frame was the same, the field the same ... and the symbionts had not changed: Bainite quivering with suppressed excitement, Pyrite watching their reunion with wise copper-gold optics. The scaleframe, he didn’t recognize--no doubt a new addition to the other carrier’s cohort.

“We found him for ya, Boss!” 

“Yeah, ‘Sides saw him and remembered what you did--and how come you never told us about the driller, Boss? That was slaggin’ awesome!” Their voices overlapped as Rumble and Frenzy both tried to tell the story to their master. “And Ravage knew that they owed you big-time, so we all went and we f-found him and we told ‘im what you’d found and where they’d taken ya.” 

“Yeah, and told ‘im if he didn’t help us we’d beat him inta scrap, and then Frenzy got into a fight with Bainite and he’s still got fangmarks on his aft! Check it out!” 

“I t-totally won, though!” Frenzy inserted, in case there might be any doubt. Helpfully, the mechkin presented his small aft for inspection. “Even with Ratbat tryin’ ta b-boss us around all the time, we-- eep!” he yelped as a cable snaked around him and his framebrother both, Soundwave gathering them wriggling back into his embrace. 

“I did not!” protested the glideframe stoutly, albeit muffled and decidedly squeaky from his tight-wedged place between Soundwave’s palm and his chestplates. “They wouldn’t listen,” amended the symbiont, little trembling wingclaws catching at the deep gouges on Soundwave’s heavy armor.

“Well, uhm. Right.” Demolishor had released Soundwave when the civvie no longer looked like he was about to attack the other Chronicler, which was good, because most of them little technimal-things started piling onto him, and some of them were damned sharp, he knew full well. And the tentacles -- slag, those were creepy as ever. “I guess I’ll just... leave you to it, then?” No one even acknowledged him. The dux vented a sigh and backed out, the doorframe too small for him to turn around properly. 

He sincerely hoped that Soundwave didn’t murder the other officer in his absence. Because then he’d probably want to keep *all* them technimals, and slag, ten? Well, no rule against it, and Soundwave’d managed to keep, like, thirty or forty at the Arena, but seriously. This was the *army*, for Primus’s sake. 

The hatch slid closed behind him; Soundwave neither knew nor cared. 

“Welcome to the Decepticons,” Amplitude said wryly. “Even if you took the long and risky way around. I could have gotten you here a lot sooner.”

Soundwave lifted his helm slowly, his symbionts’ exvents and the motion of their bodies curling little puffs of cool air over his overheated internals. “Soundwave ... now a tribunus,” the carrier said, a blank realization and reply both, as registration keys started reporting in to him, opening his access to the Citadel networks. He had to check the permissions coding twice -- apparently, Thunderwing hadn’t been just any tribunus, but rather a luminary just a single promotion below a dux, reporting directly to several legati. “Risk, acceptable.”

Even with the module clamped down tightly, he could read the sudden flare of shock and jealousy in Amplitude’s field. Bainite gnashed his mandibles. “Hey, that’s not fair! We were the ones who reported --” Pyrite hissed at the foxframe, who subsided reluctantly.

“There’s a reason, Soundwave, that I keep my cohort out of high-level army politics,” the green carrier said, flexing his talons. “You’d do well to remember that.”

Soundwave tilted his helm, assessing the other carrier through his exhausted haze. There was jealousy there, of course, tinged with surprise and resentment; only to be expected, given Soundwave’s sudden rise in rank. But there was also concern, and worry--both for Amplitude’s own cohort, and ... for Soundwave’s symbionts as well? It was hard to tell for sure. Tired as he was, Soundwave dared not release his grip on the module, allowing it to show him only the faintest wisps of Amplitude’s thoughts.

“Politics, occasionally a necessary evil,” Soundwave observed. “Mere survival, no longer sufficient for our purposes.”

Amplitude stilled, optics spiralling a bit wider. “Interesting. I must admit, this is a new side of you. I hadn’t pegged you as being so ... ambitious.”

“Rank and power, useful. Soundwave: also does not take oaths lightly.” He looked down at his cohort, still tucked tight around and on him, cradled in cables and talons both. “Endangering cohort, undesirable, yet ... inevitable. Soundwave: will do what is necessary to ensure the rewards are worth such risk.” He had come so close to losing everything before he had even begun. If his cohort had not found Amplitude, had not bargained for his freedom ... he likely would now be deactivated or worse. It was a visceral reminder of all the futures--and failures--he had seen, and how fragile the thread of their continued survival truly was.

Amplitude regarded him. “You’ve certainly changed, Soundwave. Though something tells me you’re after more than just a promotion.” A few moments more, and then the other carrier looked down at his symbionts. “But I think you’ve been interrogated enough for the moment. Get some recharge, Soundwave ... all of you could use some downtime.” Stepping around the other cohort, he stood briefly in the open hatchway, golden optics gleaming against the darkness of his backlit faceplates. “And when you decide to tell me the rest of your story--just let me know.”

The hatch hissed shut once more, leaving them alone in the shadowed room.

Soundwave bowed his helm over his cohort, wedge-shaped heads and sinuous necks stroking his audials, Ravage’s powerful frame a bulwark at his side. “Soundwave, is proud -- of all of you,” he told them, letting them feel his gratitude. 

Hugged fiercely close to Soundwaves flank, Flipsides belatedly gentled his embrace, leaning back to catalogue the gouges in Soundwave’s armor, the chipped joints and catching gears. The mechkin made a dismayed sound. “Oh, Master, you’re--! Uhm, would it be ok if you laid down for a while? Amplitude said this was a room for officers in transit, so we can use it. But that-- if you keep putting weight on it like that, it’s going to split even more and then....”

“Yeah! We’ll stand guard so you can rest, so don’t worry! Are we really gonna be Tribunus-es? Frenzy was messing with the energon dispenser, and he found a way to make it....”

It took Soundwave a moment to find the particular damage that Flipsides had noticed. His right thigh plate had been cracked through most of the thickness of the plating, and kneeling only strained the remaining connections further. It was just one more blocked-off damage report among a multitude, but he nodded. 

The three mechkin helped Soundwave lever himself onto the berth, the two flightframes taking wing and resettling themselves, Ratbat clinging determinedly through the whole process, as if Soundwave might wander away and get himself scrapped if the little glideframe released him for even a second. The youngest two mechkin trotted to a corner of the room and returned with cubes of repairgrade, the energon bitter with suspended metals. 

_//Soundwave, wishes to hear of all your adventures,//_ he told them, stroking along Ravage’s sharp backplates as the bladeframe jumped up beside him.

His First vented fondly, twisted to push his head under those scritching, chipped talons. Tracking down and approaching Amplitude had only been a logical step, a chance encounter that he had seized upon in desperation, but carriers tended to be irrational about such things. Of course Soundwave would want to know everything.

“Better than tell -- I’ll show you!” Ratbat squeaked, oblivious, snuffling at Soundwave’s fingers as his carrier refuelled. There were some interesting off-white paint nanites under the curve of each battered talon.

The two flightframes exchanged glances. “Show us what happened to you, too, Boss?” Buzzsaw requested, twisting his long neck to map the course of a rough-edged gouge. It looked like Soundwave had gone six rounds with an angry tankframe -- but some of the other scars were clearly electrical, scorches just at the edge of neural centers, places calculated to cause greatest pain. Buzzsaw bristled, tail lashing. There were any number of ways to make a mech disappear, and once he found out who’d done this.... 

Soundwave nodded mutely. He could edit the most distressing portions, but all of the symbionts enjoyed ‘seeing’ the unique insights of the module, the coding of other mecha through the filter of his senses and memories. It was an entirely unique point of view, a type of memory no other symbiont could claim. He could run his codecheck comparisons at the same time. Soundwave finished the energon and gingerly settled himself back -- his sensor panels pinged compression errors; the outer shields had probably been dented -- as his symbionts piled in alongside him. Even Flipsides, reluctantly, though Soundwave could tell he dearly wanted to start on some of his master’s injuries -- but Soundwave had no medical supplies to offer the symbiont, indeed nothing at all in his subspace after being imprisoned. 

All too soon, Soundwave would need to plan, to consider his next moves. Fate had swept away all his careful plans, like so much dust before an acid storm. He had somehow stumbled into almost impossible success, a meteoric rise that had no precedent. Chances were good that Soundwave had just become the only active civilian-framed tribunus in the Decepticon forces. Mecha were certain to try to undermine his newfound authority, both superiors and subordinates alike ready to test Soundwave’s mettle, to cut him down to size. 

But for now he was safe, mostly whole, and reunited with his cohort. 

Everything else in the universe could wait, just a few joors.

 

*************

 

**Coda:**

“The game has changed.”

Roadblock turned, showing no sign of surprise. For all anyone could tell, he had known Schism was there all along; neither his field nor his frame evidenced anything but mild curiosity and more than a little skepticism.

“Because your pet has caught the Lord High Protector’s optics? Just because a piece has shifted levels, Schism, does not mean that the game itself has changed.”

“Does it not?” Schism stalked forward, the crimson mech surveying the now-empty sparring ring. Away from other mecha, his every movement was eerily fluid, alien--almost organic in its predatory silence. “You are as observant as always, Roadblock, but too often you fail to ask the most important question of all.”

“And that would be?” Roadblock replied, humoring the other mech. His blocky, uninspired orange and gray frame seemed clumsy next to Schism’s sharp-edged, whittled down frame, his movements slow and unremarkable. That impression, as Schism well knew, was just as false as Roadblock’s assumed obliviousness.

“ _Why?_ ” Schism said. “That is the question, and one to which we have surprisingly few answers. Why does this mech know so much? Why did a civilian frametype -- especially one designed to harbor a host of fragile parasitic submecha--join the Decepticons, instead of fleeing to the Prime like almost all the others? Why did he not report that his fellow comm officer was compromised? Such a report would have garnered him a commendation, at the very least. Instead he risked his rank and his position to very ably play his hand in a game far above his station. Why?”

“Ambition?” Roadblock suggested, his armor rippling in an offhand shrug.

“Perhaps. But there are far easier ways to gain notice. Which brings us to the next question--why did Lord Megatron himself take such notice of this mech? Amplitude’s report was compelling, but it did not warrant the Lord Protector’s personal attention. Much less an interview. And Soundwave’s performance there, the intel he’d uncovered .... Why, why, and why again? There are too many questions here, Roadblock, and I dislike having no answers for them.”

“What do you intend?” 

“For the moment, I intend to do nothing. We will hunt traitors, set our traps and interrogate what we catch. But I will watch. A mech such as this--he will stumble. He will make mistakes. Once he does ... then we shall see just how he knows more than he should. And then I will truly know what game he plays.”

“And how best to use this new piece to your advantage, I would wager,” Roadblock said dryly.

“Of course.” Schism flickered the barest sidelong look at his companion. “You know as well as I that knowledge is power. And what is power for, if not to be exercised?”


End file.
